Paper Trail

Read an excerpt from climate activist Vanessa Nakate’s new memoir; Tonight in Brooklyn, the Franklin Park reading series continues


Vanessa Nakate. Photo: Paul Wamala Ssegujja.

Claire Denis, the French director of Beau Travail, is currently filming her adaptation of Denis Johnson’s thriller The Stars at Noon. In the vein of Robert Stone and Graham Greene, Stars, one of Johnson’s early novels, follows an English businessman and an American woman, who fall in love in a politically volatile Nicaragua. Margaret Qualley and Joe Alwyn will play the leads.

Lithub has run an excerpt from Vanessa Nakate’s A Bigger Picture: My Fight to Bring a New African Voice to the Climate Crisis, in which she describes her involvement with the environmentalist group Arctic Basecamp. The AP covered the group, but the photo they published cropped out Nakate, the only non-white person who had posed for the photo. As Nakate tweeted at the AP: “You didn’t just erase a photo. You erased a continent.”

“Before him the only writer I’d read on squirrels was Nabokov. But the Russian never tells you how to kill them (with a 28-gauge Ruger shotgun, ‘a gun as elegant as an egret’), skin them (with a hunting knife) or serve them (in gumbo).” Christian Lorentzen writes about Padgett Powell.

Last week, Knopf’s Regan Arthur purchased a recently discovered memoir by Paul Newman.

Tonight in Brooklyn at 8pm, the Franklin Park reading series will host an event featuring Torey Peters (Detransition, Baby), Kristen Radtke (Seek You), Kyle Lucia Wu (Win Me Something), Blake Z. Rong (I Am Not Young And I Will Die With This Car In My Garage), and Khaholi Bailey (Miseducation of a ’90s Baby).