The gubernatorial race in Virginia, to be decided on Tuesday, is neck-and-neck. In the final weeks of his campaign, Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin has been criticizing his opponent, Terry McAuliffe, for vetoing (twice) legislation that would require all public-school teachers in the state to tell parents of any reading material with “sexually explicit content.” (The bill has been nicknamed “The Beloved Bill,” after the Toni Morrison novel.) McAuliffe’s response has been to the point: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
In the latest installment of his consistently annoying newsletter, Malcolm Gladwell plugs his new audiobook of conversations with Paul Simon, and writes: “Stories about musicians, to my mind, should only be told in audio form—which is why Miracle and Wonder was imagined and created as an audiobook alone. Why would anyone read a book about a musician? It would be like following the ballet on the radio.”
The Iowa Translation Workshop has announced the Iowa Arts Fellowship for Diversity, which will provide full tuition and a stipend.
Print-book sales are up 7 percent in October.
Riverhead Books has bought the US rights to the latest novel by Abdulrazak Gurnah, winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature. According to the publisher, Afterlives, set in East Africa, is about three characters whose lives are deeply affected by the “brutal colonization” of the region in the first half of the 20th century. Riverhead says the novel is a “sweeping, multigenerational saga of displacement, loss, and love.” . . . In other book-deal news, Jess Row has sold a new essay collection titled On Being Short to Graywolf. The book will examine the dysfunctional lives of American men in the twenty-first century, among other topics.
On Wednesday at 6pm Eastern time, novelist Tom McCarthy will discuss his new novel, The Making of Incarnation, with art critic Hal Foster. The event will take place on Zoom.