The Edinburgh International Book Festival is offering a hybrid program this year, with over 250 online events. This weekend, Jeremy Atherton Lin will discuss his new book Gay Bar; Katie Kitamura, author of the novel Intimacies, will give a talk and Q&A on “Familiarity and Contempt”; and Claire-Louise Bennett will talk about her second book, Checkout-19, with fellow novelist Elaine Feeney.
Vice Media has instituted another round of layoffs. According to Lindsey Ellefson at The Wrap, Vice’s chief digital officer, Cory Haik, sent a memo to staff heralding promotions and growth at the company before getting to the bad news: “As part of this continued global alignment we’ve unfortunately had to say goodbye to some of our friends and colleagues today.”
Politico is being sold to German media conglomerate Axel Springer for over $1 billion.
The Los Angeles Review of Books has published a rediscovered 1982 interview with Jorge Luis Borges. On psychology, Borges said: “Everybody’s supposed to hate his father or his mother. My father thought it was a very futile science. I don’t understand people who claim they’ve mastered psychology. I feel pity for them. To be so interested in themselves, in analyzing themselves. I hardly know myself. Nobody does.”
McNally Jackson bookstore has announced the launch of a new paperback series, McNally Editions, which will be “devoted to hidden gems,” and covers designed by Peter Mendelsund. Among the first books to be published in the series are David Foster Wallace’s Something to Do with Paying Attention, Han Suyin’s Winter Love, and Kay Dick’s They.
In the current issue of the Adroit Journal, Campbell Campbell and Thomas Wee interview Brandon Taylor, author of Real Life and Filthy Animals, about realism, academia, and interiority. Taylor discusses grounding interiority in the body: “The more interesting part of a character’s interiority isn’t even the thing that the author says; the more interesting part is often what is underneath the interiority. The subtext of the interiority that the author is evoking. The pulses that grant access to the character. It’s like being in a plane and going over a body of water and looking down to see sometimes a flat surface and sometimes a dark surface, but there are sometimes flashes of light that you can see at the right angle. That is a well functioning interiority—moments of insight and illuminated patches of consciousness.”
The Brooklyn Public Library has announced its 2021 longlist for the BPL Literary Prize. In fiction, the nominees include Brontez Purnell, Torrey Peters, Raven Leilani and more; in nonfiction, Zadie Smith, Isabel Wilkerson, and Elizabeth Kolbert. The prize—co-presented by The Brooklyn Eagles, a Brooklyn library supporters organization—will be announced in November.