Essayist and editor Lewis Lapham has died at the age of eighty-nine. Lapham was the editor in chief at Harper’s Magazine for almost three decades (1976–1981; 1983–2006) during which he introduced features that remain fixtures of the magazine today: “The Harper’s Index,” “Readings,” and “Annotations.” In 2006 he founded Lapham’s Quarterly with the goal to “bring the voices of the past up to the microphone of the present.” In their remembrance, the Quarterly staff write that Lapham’s “ingenuity, skepticism, formidable work ethic, vast reading and often droll sense of fun, drew our admiration even in those cases when we might have disagreed with his contrarian and unpredictable opinions—political or otherwise.” In addition to his work as an editor, Lapham was also a prolific essayist and satirical writer. Harper’s recommends a selection of his essays and columns for the magazine. In a 2019 “Art of Editing” interview with the Paris Review, Lapham discussed his writing life, his abandoned novel, and the development of his style. On adverbs and adjectives: “Always under suspicion. To describe a woman as fabulous is to say she is nowhere to be seen.”
The Booker Prize longlist has been announced. Among the thirteen authors nominated for their books are Percival Everett, Rachel Kushner, Claire Messud, Colin Barrett, and Rita Bullwinkel. Three authors are nominated for debut novels.
The Irish novelist Edna O’Brien has died at the age of ninety-three. O’Brien is perhaps most famous for her debut trilogy—The Country Girls (1960), The Lonely Girl (1962), and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1963)—which were once banned in Ireland. In The Guardian, Irish writers Anne Enright, Colm Tóibín, Megan Nolan, Eimear McBride, and Alex Clark pay tribute to O’Brien; Tóibín writes of his friend: “What Edna really wanted to talk about was style, how style works in sentences, how style in prose is a way of transforming the self and the world.” Granta has unpaywalled her short story “Chekhov’s Ladies.”
In a new essay for Granta, Mary Gaitskill writes about a little-practiced kind of physical therapy she received during a difficult time: “In the context of this story, all you need to know is that my life had begun to seem wrong to me. Not broken exactly or meaningless. More like misguided or undeveloped. My heart hurt.”