The Booker Prize–winning novelist Arundhati Roy is facing prosecution under India’s harsh anti-terror laws for comments she made about Kashmir fourteen years ago. The writer Amitav Ghosh wrote on X: “The hounding of Arundhati Roy is absolutely unconscionable. She is a great writer and has the right to her opinion. There should be an international outcry against prosecuting her for something she said a decade ago.”
The new issue of the Paris Review is out now, with an Art of Fiction interview with Mary Robison, an Art of Nonfiction interview with Elaine Scarry, and new writing by Mosab Abu Toha, Anne Serre, K Patrick, Renee Gladman, and more.
Meghan O’Rourke, editor of the Yale Review and the author of The Invisible Kingdom, writes about ambivalence in an essay for Poetry Monthly: “The poetic line, open at both ends, afloat on the page, instructs us in how to live uncertainty—to live a line (a life) so open that it can break.”
In the July issue of Harper’s, novelist Benjamín Labatut writes about the past and future of AI: “Faced, as we are, with wild speculation, confronted with dangers that no one, however smart or well informed, is truly capable of managing or understanding, and taunted by the promises of unlimited potential, we may have to sound out the future not merely with science, politics, and reason, but with that devil-eye we use to see in the dark: fiction.”
Patrick Cottrell considers novelist Tracy O’Neill’s memoir A Woman of Interest at BOMB. The book, which follows the author’s search for her birth mother in South Korea, “is simultaneously an investigation, a noir with a femme fatale, and a darkly humorous take of what happens when one meets the person who has everything and nothing to do with one’s life.”