Verso Books has made Alex S. Vitale’s 2017 The End of Policing free to download as an e-book on its website. In Vitale’s words: “The problem is not police training, police diversity, or police methods. The problem is the dramatic and unprecedented expansion and intensity of policing in the last forty years, a fundamental shift in the role of police in society. The problem is policing itself.” (For more from Vitale, see his new article in The Nation: “The Only Solution Is to Defund the Police.”)
Michael Robbins has been publishing new poems, from his forthcoming book Walkman, on Twitter: “I think people should eschew the whole submission process & just put shit out there for free during the apocalypse…”
Rebecca Solnit has written an essay about men who refuse to wear masks during the pandemic: “Wearing masks, it turns out, is not manly, when the definition of manly is not having to do fuck-all out of concern for others.”
Book deals: Putnam has purchased Nathalia Holt’s Wise Gals: The Spies Who Built the CIA and Changed the Future of Espionage, which “recounts the untold story of four trailblazing women in the Cold War–era intelligence service . . . but who are largely forgotten today.” Knopf has announced that it will publish Amitava Kumar’s next novel, A Time Outside This Time, in 2021.
Murmrr Lit will host the virtual launch of Otessa Moshfegh’s new novel, Death in Her Hands, on June 25. At the online event, Moshfegh will discuss her work with New Yorker writer Ariel Levy.