In BOMB magazine, a conversation between Madelaine Lucas and Jessica Au, whose new novel, Cold Enough for Snow, has won the Novel Prize. Au tells Lucas, “I often think that to really answer a serious question, I would have to write a novel to explain why I think the way I think, or what’s formed me. . . . You would need so much context and backstory to fully have another consciousness recognize your own.”
In “Eric Adams’s Moral Panics,” Kay Gabriel writes for Jewish Currents about the New York City mayor’s approach to crime and the left’s response. Gabriel argues that “criminalization is a tool wielded by reactionaries and directed against the left in general: No form of politics has proved more capable of disarticulating people from one another.”
Lauren Groff has been awarded the 2022 Joyce Carol Oates prize. In Bookforum’s winter issue, Moira Donegan wrote about Groff’s latest book, Matrix, a fictional tale about Marie de France at a twelfth-century monastery: “Groff’s prose has the formality and cadence associated with historical fiction, but she inserts playfulness and color into her narrative, showing charming, occasionally silly vignettes of daily life that give the abbey a distinctive realism.”
In The Nation, Lily Geismer talks about her new book, Left Behind: The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality.
In Harper’s Magazine, Sam Lipsyte visits the Erotic Heritage Museum in Las Vegas and ponders “digisexuality”: “I’ve come to the Erotic Heritage Museum to attend a talk on sex, love, and technology. Still, a part of me wonders if I can capture the whole story without boinking Emma, the museum’s resident sexbot.”
Tonight, Garth Greenwell will read from a novel in progress and answer questions at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The in-person event can also be attended via Zoom.