The 2024 International Booker Prize has been awarded to Jenny Erpenbeck for her novel Kairos, translated by Michael Hofmann. Erpenbeck has said of the book, “It’s a private story of a big love and its decay, but it’s also a story of the dissolution of a whole political system. Simply put: How can something that seems right in the beginning, turn into something wrong?” In her Bookforum review, Janique Vigier wrote, “Kairos captures a moment when history curtailed gesture, adventures of the heart. Erpenbeck’s task is the attempt to make sense of a perished code of behavior.”
Publishers Lisa Lucas (Pantheon Schocken) and Reagan Arthur (Knopf) were both laid off in Penguin Random House’s Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group’s latest “restructure.”
In the new issue of the London Review of Books, Anahid Nersessian writes about the student encampments at UCLA: “Emerging from within the university, they offer another possibility for what the university might be. One of the more potent images circulating from the camps has been of a student holding a sign that reads: ‘Columbia, why require me to read Prof. Edward Said if you don’t want me to use it?’”
Sam Huber’s book about Kate Millett, A World We Can Bear, was sold to Pantheon.
Upcoming events: Tonight in Brooklyn, n+1 will host Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld discussing their new book, The Hollow Parties, with Mark Krotov; on May 28th, Moira Donegan will talk to Hannah Zeavin about Freud and feminism in a free online salon or in-person event at Stanford University; on May 30th, 4Columns presents Jennifer Kabat in conversation with Jennifer Krasinski about Kabat’s new book, The Eighth Moon, at Topos Too in Ridgewood.