Alexandra Alter surveys the recent crop of pandemic fiction for the New York Times, and talks with novelists Sarah Moss, Weike Wang, Sigrid Nunez, and more about how they decided to handle COVID-19 in their work. The critic Daniel Mendelsohn also weighed in: “You couldn’t yet have the great coronavirus novel, because we don’t know how this story ends yet.”
At The Baffler, musician and writer Taylor Ho Bynum offers a literary improvisation on free jazz pioneer Cecil Taylor to celebrate the release of The Complete, Legendary, Live Return Concert. Bynum’s piece is composed of forty-four fragments, one of which reads: “This is not how I usually write, but I didn’t play the way I usually play when I played with Cecil.”
The New Inquiry has launched a new blog, “Death Panel,” about health and politics, with posts by Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Philip Rocco, and Artie Vierkant of the Death Panel podcast. In the first installment, Adler-Bolton and Vierkant write: “The pandemic’s socially constructed ‘ending’ has been a long, ongoing process. Years of optimistic predictions, emphasis on personal responsibility, and reductive assumptions about individual risk have calcified into a set of positions now held by many of the most prominent voices on covid.”
Tonight at 7pm, n+1 magazine is hosting an online book launch for Ari M. Brostoff’s essay collection Missing Time.
Tomorrow afternoon at 1pm Eastern, Haymarket Books, the We Be Imagining podcast, and Logic magazine host an online discussion about Black freedom and technology. The panel includes contributors to a recent Logic special issue, “Beacons”: Andre Brock, SA Smythe, and Zoé Samudzi, with moderation by J. Khadijah Abdurahman.