Peter Maass, the author of Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War, writes about Ron Haviv’s photographs of a Kyiv suburb, which depict cars, bicycles, strollers, and other objects abandoned by Ukrainians desperately trying to flee the war. “These photos tell us the beginnings of stories that we dread following to their ends. There is a cane on the ground—what happened to its owner? Were they scooped up by a relative who realized their grandmother or grandfather was moving too slowly to survive the bombs? Did they fall by the roadside, alone? Their body, is it over there somewhere?”
At the New Yorker, Hua Hsu interviews poet, novelist, and MacArthur winner Ocean Vuong, who says: “My mode is thoroughness at all costs. Whether it’s my fiction or my poetry, I just go over it again and again, I make sure I did everything I could, I play devil’s advocate with myself. Same with my students. I tend to over-teach . . . not that I’m giving them more knowledge than they need, but I teach beyond the point of what’s relevant. It may have something to do with growing up bilingual and seeing your elders, who are so powerful to you, not being heard. I think I internalized a lot of that, where I just think, Am I being heard?”
James Ledbetter reports for Observer on the tribute to author and activist Todd Gitlin, who died in February. Attendees included writers and journalists Siri Hustvedt, Paul Auster, Michael Tomasky, Eric Alterman, Katha Pollitt, Paul Berman, and Michael Massing. Gitlin, an ardent activist in the ’60s, “continued to take part in more recent protest movements, including Occupy Wall Street and the attempts to get universities to divest from fossil-fuel companies. Gitlin was known for being critical of other activists’ tactics—he felt Occupy Wall Street was too unfocused, for example—but, several speakers noted, never wavered in his support of their causes.”
After a three-year hiatus, the London Book Fair is back up and running, and according to a report in Publishers Weekly, the fair saw a handful of big-name book deals: Quercus “acquired the English-language rights for the next three installments of Stieg Larsson’s Dragon Tattoo series, this time written by Swedish author Karin Smirnoff,” and Canongate purchased Son of Nobody, a “retelling of the Trojan War” by Yann Martel, the author of Life of Pi.
The New York Review of Books has posted a short interview with contributor Colm Tóibín, who, though known as a novelist and critic, is now publishing his first book of poetry. “Poems and novels can both come from impulse,” Tóibín notes. “Often the impulse, the original one, is enough to sustain a poem, but a novel requires many dull days of work.”
Tonight at 7:30pm Eastern Time, Greenlight Bookstore will host a Zoom event featuring Colleen Kinder, who will discuss Letter to a Stranger: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us, which she edited. To gather material for the book, Kinder invited a number of writers to “write a letter to a stranger who haunts you.” Joining her will be contributors Gregory Pardlo, Carlynn Houghton, Sarah Perry, and Jenessa Abrams, as well as Leslie Jamison, who wrote the book’s introduction.