A profile of Patricia Lockwood, whose new book, No One is Talking About This, comes out on Tuesday. Of the novel, Lockwood says, “I was trying to write an atmosphere. I was trying to write something . . . that is pre-language, that is just instinct and that’s awareness of what the herd is doing around you.”
Ruth Dickey has been named the executive director of the National Book foundation. Dickey, a poet and director of Seattle Arts & Lectures, told the New York Times: “As a queer kid growing up in a small town, books brought me the world.”
The Times’s morning newsletter has reached 1 billion unique opens since its launch in May 2020. The publication is working on ways to convert newsletter readers into paid subscribers to the paper.
The Library of Congress has acquired an important collection of rare books, the Aramont Collection, from an anonymous donor who also gave the library $1 million to make the set accessible to the public.
Mark your calendars: on February 24th Symphony Space, The Strand, Grand Central Publishing, and the Library of America are partnering to create a celebration of visionary sci-fi writer Octavia E. Butler. The LOA’s volume collecting Butler’s fiction was published in January.
At Columbia Journalism Review, Lyz Lenz unspools “thread man” Seth Abramson’s method of “meta-journalism.” Abramson is a poet and former public defender best known today for his long Twitter threads aggregating news stories on everything from Russian interference to insurrection at the Capitol. “Yet Abramson’s meta-journalism may not actually be journalism,” Lenz writes, “it’s just him sitting at home, tweeting out stories he’s stacked together like a house of cards, without vetting them for accuracy.” As a poet, Abramson has a history of questionably repurposing words that are not his own; “I’m the reason that Shia LaBeouf became a performance artist,” he told Lenz.