At Literary Hub, Sheila Heti writes about the people who she trusts to read early drafts of her work and the importance of these relationships to her process: “It’s always important to show a work in progress to more than one person at a time, so that nobody’s opinion is too influential. What if you show it to only one person and they hate it? And you believe them! Or they love it? And you believe them! Better to send it to two, three or four people, so that you can situate the truth about the draft somewhere along that range.”
Columbia Journalism Review has put together a package, “Beyond Atonement,” that looks back at how the magazine has covered race over the past six decades. CJR fellows Shinhee Kang, Ian Karbal, and Feven Merid contribute stories from their archival research.
“It’s uncommon for the subject of a profile to warmly remember the profiler, and my friendship with Janet struck some people as odd.” In the new issue of Artforum, David Salle offers a remembrance of Janet Malcolm, whose 1994 profile of Salle in the New Yorker, Forty-one False Starts, is one of her most well-known essays, particularly among art writers. “Like any good analyst,” Salle writes, “she was only interested in the story behind the story. The fact that a belief is widely held should be enough to raise our suspicions.”
Naomi Gibbs will be joining Pantheon as executive editor on September 7. Previously, Gibbs worked at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, where she edited books by Ursula K. Le Guin, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, and Alexander Chee.
For the New York Times, Jennifer Wilson reviews The Gambler Wife, Andrew D. Kaufman’s biography of Anna Dostoyevskaya, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s second wife. Anna met the author when she worked as his stenographer, and after they were married set up an imprint to publish her husband’s books as single-volume books. “According to Kaufman,” Wilson notes, “Anna was the first solo woman publisher in Russia. Sofya Tolstaya, the wife of Leo Tolstoy, sought her advice when she decided to set up a similar operation.”