Vogue and Oprah Daily Books have posted their lists of the most-anticipated books of 2022.
At the New York Times, Alex Traub has written an obituary for bookseller Ben McFall, the “heart” of the Strand Bookstore. “In phone interviews, three people—Lisa Lucas, the publisher of Pantheon Books; the writer Lucy Sante, a onetime Strand colleague of Mr. McFall’s; and Nancy Bass Wyden, the Strand’s owner—all referred unprompted to the reliability with which, when visiting Mr. McFall, they’d encounter a line of other people hoping to speak to him.”
The Guardian has a new interview with Luster author Raven Leilani: “I wanted to write something that felt honest and urgent. Because I was trying to scrabble together pages, I wrote in a panic and edited myself emotionally less, so the work came from a more vulnerable place. And some of the most vulnerable subjects for me, I guess, are art and intimacy and failure.”
At the New Republic, Philippa Snow uses Marlowe Granados’s Happy Hour and Christine Smallwood’s The Life of the Mind as the foundation for an essay about optimism and striving in contemporary fiction.
Publishers Weekly reports on the status of literary festivals scheduled for this winter. Last week, the American Booksellers Association announced that it was canceling its February conference. Two other major festivals—the Jaipur Literature Festival in Jaipur, India, and the Bologna Children’s Book Fair in Bologna, Italy—are still planning to go forward as in-person events.