At the New York Times, Parul Sehgal reviews Salman Rushdie’s latest novel, Quichotte, finding that the exuberance and panache of his early work has now become formulaic and mannered: “He is a writer in free fall. What happened?”
In The Guardian, war correspondent Sara Firth wonders if anyone is still paying attention to the war in Syria: “When I first started reporting inside Syria at the very beginning of the war I felt humbled at being entrusted with the brave stories of the Syrian men and women paying such a high price in asking for freedom in their own country. Now, I feel humiliation. Just another journalist reporting a tragic situation. There’s an unspoken reality permeating all my interviews: nothing will come of this.”
Neiman Labs looks at “How Writing Off the Working Class Has Hurt the Mainstream Media.”
Lit Hub rounds up the best book covers of August. We’re happy to see that two Bookfoum office favorites—Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror (design by Sharanya Durvasula) and Mary Kay Wilmers’s Human Relations and Other Difficulties (art by Peter Campbell)—have made the cut.
Award news: Words Without Borders has announced its 2019 Poems in Translation Prize, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation has announced its Writers’ Awards. Among the winners of the latter prize is Bookforum contributor Elizabeth Schambelan; to read Schambelan on PTSD, Psychopaths, Yukio Mishima, and more, head over to her author page in our archives.