Simon & Schuster has been acquired by private equity firm KKR for $1.62 billion.
The editorial board of the Financial Times has issued a statement on the war on Gaza: “It is time for a humanitarian ceasefire. That would ease the suffering of Palestinians and cool regional tensions. Hamas must release all hostages.”
The Paris Review has published the novelist Isabella Hammad’s Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture, which was delivered this September at Columbia University. She discusses the Palestinian struggle, crisis and turning points, “recognition scenes,” and writing about the life of her great-grandfather Midhat Kamal. “To recognize something is,” Hammad writes, “to perceive clearly what on some level you have known all along but that perhaps you did not want to know. Palestinians are familiar with such scenes in real life: apparent blindness followed by staggering realization. When someone, a stranger, suddenly comes to know what perhaps they did not want to know.”
New online, n+1 has published a transcription of a teach-in that took place last week at the New School on the history of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Siddhartha Deb, one of the organizers of the event, said: “I mourn the loss of all civilian lives, Israeli and Palestinian, but I do so with the awareness that all civilian lives do not matter equally in the eyes of the imperial west, that they never have. All humans are equal, apparently, but those described as ‘human animals’ matter less than others. We are here in opposition to that, to offer you our thoughts in these broken times in a broken world, and because we recognize, across the range of our different, shifting identities, that something terrible is happening and that it must be stopped now.”
LitHub shares recordings of Shirley Jackson reading two of her stories—“The Daemon Lover” and “The Lottery”—out loud in 1960, five years before she died. And at The Drift, read a ghost story by K Patrick, author of the novel Mrs S.