The new issue of Bookforum is out today! Our fall-fiction package includes reviews of novels by Colson Whitehead, Joy Williams, Miriam Toews, Jonathan Franzen, Tao Lin, and Percival Everett, plus an interview with Asali Solomon. Also in the magazine: James Hannaham’s diary on Fernando Pessoa and flying; Charlotte Shane’s consideration of Maggie Nelson, freedom, and care; Daphne Merkin’s reassessment of the hated and celebrated D. H. Lawrence; and more.
In The Baffler, Dana Kopel writes about working to unionize staff of the New Museum, and the museum unionization movement taking hold across the country: “I’ve received calls and emails from countless museum workers asking for advice about the unionization process, and I’ve watched from afar as these conversations have blossomed into action.”
Lucy Scholes, who writes the Paris Review’s “Re-Covered” column on lesser-known women writers from the past, joins the Lost Ladies of Lit podcast to talk about Rosamund Lehmann’s 1927 debut novel, Dusty Answer.
Brandon Taylor reviews Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You for the New York Times Book Review. Taylor finds the novel’s defensiveness both charming and frustrating: “In my less charitable moments, it felt as though we’ve reached a point in our culture where the pinnacle of moral rigor in the novel form is an overwhelmed white woman in a major urban center sighing and having a thought about the warming planet or the existence of refugees.”
In the new issue of the New York Review of Books, Dan Chiasson writes about Bread and Puppet Theater, the anticapitalist Vermont troupe formed by Elka and Peter Schumann in 1963. Chiasson describes the larger-than-life puppets: “Smirking, wincing, portly, wizened, the puppets make up a vision of humanity in its entirety: heroes, pests, capitalists, sadists, all of them helplessly locked into their assigned natures and motives, unchanged from season to season.”