Join Bookforum tonight at 7pm EDT for the first episode of our new video series, No Wrong Answers. Anuk Arudpragasam will talk about his Booker Prize–longlisted novel A Passage North with Megha Majumdar, whose own novel, A Burning, was a New York Times notable novel and was longlisted for the National Book Award. The event is free and will be streamed via Zoom. You can RSVP here.
PEN America has posted videos from its 2021 World Voices Festival. The twenty-five videos include panels and conversations about literature with writers including George Saunders, Matthew Salesses, and Rivka Galchen on teaching writing; Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and Imbolo Mbue on history and literature; Kiese Laymon, Robert Jones, Jr., and Brian Broome on masculinity and radical love; Alison Bechdel, Torrey Peters, and Rivers Solomon on transformation in queer stories, and much more. . .
For Vulture, Jennifer Wilson reviews Alexandra Kleeman’s novel, Something New Under the Sun: “Kleeman takes the water wars of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown and updates them for our era of severe droughts and unending wildfires, giving us a slick neo-noir where the central crime is neither murder nor blackmail but climate change.”
Yesterday, Twitter verified Cormac McCarthy, giving a “blue check” to an author account that was clearly a hoax. (One tweet reads, in part, “My granddaughter says it is customary when a tweet becomes popular to refer readers to one’s sound cloud.”) New Republic staff writer Alex Shephard did his due diligence and asked McCarthy’s publisher and agent if it could possibly really be him. It wasn’t. Hoaxer Tommaso Debenedetti was pleased, while Ryan Cooper remembered the last time Twitter was fooled by a fake McCarthy (2012). For more on pranks and hoaxes in the literary world, read Lauren Oyler’s Bookforum essay on trolling book people and other gullible romantics.
On September 2, Merve Emre will present her new annotated edition of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway in a conversation hosted by Community Bookstore in Brooklyn.