The Washington Post is reviving Book World, its stand-alone book section. As the paper’s critic Ron Charles reports: “Starting Sept. 25, the Sunday paper will contain a separate broadsheet section devoted entirely to book reviews and literary features. The move coincides with the addition of new staff members, including Book World’s new editor in chief, John Williams, who starts Sept. 6.”
The TikTok Book Club, #BookTok, will now be sponsored by Amazon.
At Jacobin, Ryan Napier reviews Michel Houellebecq’s latest, Interventions 2020, a grab bag of letters, interviews, and essays about figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Neil Young. Is Houellebecq a “prophet of the right”? The author, Napier notes, “cannot simply be cast as a figure of the Right. His novels at times fall into a right-wing critique of neoliberalism, but also contain a more penetrating diagnosis of contemporary atomization.”
Dimes Square, the Matthew Gasda play starring cultural critic Christian Lorentzen, will be performed twice this week, on Wednesday and Thursday.
On Wednesday night at 7pm in the Bryant Park Reading Room, the New York Public Library will host a conversation between Lucy Sante and Sasha Frere-Jones. The two cultural critics will be discussing, among other things, Sante’s new book, Nineteen Waterways, which looks at the complex system that provides water for New York City, and also considers the communities destroyed and displaced by the creation of that system. You can register here.