Dave Hickey—legendary magazine writer and author of the essay collection Air Guitar—has died. As Christopher Knight at the Los Angeles Times notes in his appreciation, Air Guitar “is easily the most widely read book of art criticism to appear in our time.” You can read Hickey’s Bookforum column on Colson Whitehead and poker here.
At Public Books, Merve Emre talks about annotating Mrs. Dalloway: “My goal was not to confront the reader with a boring, scholarly series of footnotes pointing him or her to places and dates. Instead, I wanted to help to create a new text and a new mode of interacting with that text, on the margins of what we think of as ‘the real literary-critical event.’”
The New York Times has released its list of 100 notable books of 2021.
At The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf dwells on Pope Francis’s recent comment that journalists should escape “the tyranny of always being online,” and have “the patience to meet face-to-face with the people to be interviewed, the protagonists of the stories being told, the sources from which to receive news.”
Scribner has purchased Elwin Cotman’s debut novel The Age of Ignorance for a reported six figures. According to the publisher, the novel is “a dramedy about the friendship between two Black transient punks seeking to find themselves in the San Francisco Bay Area while dealing with the anger and protest following a racially motivated murder at the hands of the police.”