For New York magazine, Torrey Peters interviews Karl Ove Knausgaard about his new book. The novel is Knausgaard’s first since his autofictional epic, My Struggle. The Morning Star is a departure from this work, Knausgaard’s version of a Stephen King novel. The author told Peters: “For me, literature is to try to reopen the things that are fixed . . . the things we have to fix for practical reasons, that are risky when they are unfixed. If it’s fixed, it’s easier — but that doesn’t only go for gender; that goes for almost everything, like worldviews and science and religion. But in real life, outside of ideologies, everything is floating and there are no borders.”
The current issue of the New Yorker is an archival issue collecting some of the magazine’s best food and drink writing. Read M. F. K. Fisher on cravings (1968), Anthony Bourdian’s day in the life as chef at Les Halles (2000), Calvin Trillin on eating crawfish in Louisiana (1972), dispatches from Chang-rae Lee, Zadie Smith, Nora Ephron, Kelefa Sanneh, and more.
Publishers Weekly has put together a list of some of the best indie titles that will be published this fall, including Keisha N. Blain’s tribute to Fannie Lou Hamer, Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom, Anne Carson’s H of H Playbook, and Chibundu Onuzo’s novel Sankofa.
Writers Walker Caplan and Maddie Crum are joining Joyland magazine as managing editor and Northeast editor. Both have previously contributed fiction to the journal.
On Friday, September 10, Haymarket Books and Verso are co-hosting a discussion of Deepa Kumar’s book Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire. The author will be joined by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Naomi Klein, Noura Erakat, and Jasbir Puar for a conversation on how Islamophobia is perpetuated in the United States and has been stoked in the years since 9/11 by mass surveillance, arbitrary arrests, and other tactics that bolster systemic racism and empire.