In The Nation’s Spring Books issue, Elias Rodriques reviews Richard Wright’s posthumously published novel, The Man Who Lived Underground. Rodriques also considers the true story of Herbert C. Wright, a man who retreated underground during the Great Depression because he was out of work: “He stole to support himself in an economy and a country that would not support him. The surrealist, fantastical, and gothic elements of both his story and The Man Who Lived Underground serve to underscore how bizarre and unnatural such a governmental structure should seem.”
The Guardian has published an annotated version of their very first edition, from May 5, 1821. Until 1952, the front page of the paper was filled with advertisements; the first item ever published by the Manchester Guardian was a lost and found ad for a dog.
A group of former and current employees of Black Mountain Institute and The Believer have published an open letter responding to an article published Friday by the Los Angeles Times announcing the resignation of their former boss Joshua Shenk after he exposed himself during a Zoom meeting. The article, the staffers write, “paints a picture of an unfortunate accident,” adding, “Some of us were on that call, Shenk was our boss, and this is not how we would tell that story.” The LA Times did not quote any employees in their article.
Berkley, an imprint of Penguin Random House and the publisher of Democratic voting rights activist Stacey Abrams’s first romance novels, is reissuing Rules of Engagement, The Art of Desire, and Power of Persuasion. All were published in the early 2000s under Abrams’s pseudonym Selena Montgomery, and are now out of print, with used copies fetching high prices online. Abrams, “as Selena and as Stacey,” is excited that the books will be on shelves again.
Twitter has acquired Scroll, a startup that provides an ad-free reading experience of news sites like the Daily Beast and The Atlantic on a subscription model.
This afternoon at 2 PM EST, Joshua Cohen will discuss his new novel The Netanyahus with Colm Tóibín, in a virtual event hosted by the London Review Bookshop.