For the New York Times Magazine, Parul Sehgal profiles Jenny Offill, whose new novel Weather is out next week. “Offill doesn’t write about the climate crisis but from deep within it. She does not paint pictures of apocalyptic scenarios; she charts internal cartographies. We observe her characters’ lurching shame, despair, boredom and fatigue — solastalgia experienced in ordinary life, vying with the demands of aging parents, small children, the churn of the mind,” Sehgal writes. “What she is doing, her friend the novelist Adam Ross told me, is coming as close as anyone ever has to writing the very nature of being itself.”
Spotify is buying The Ringer, Recode reports.
On the Otherppl podcast, Brad Listi talks to Amina Cain about her new novel, Indelicacy.
At Literary Hub, Christian Kiefer talks to Paris Review editor Emily Nemens about baseball, the Great Recession, and her new book, The Cactus League. “I picked baseball both because I’m a big fan—not in the stats-head, watching-every-inning way, but in the sense that I like the game, abstractly. . . . I was particularly excited to strip baseball of its bottom-of-the-ninth, this-pitch-really-counts narrative,” she explained. “Can you make a banner with that message? The Cactus League—it’s not just for sports nerds! I’m trying to get the word out.”
“My first book was a memoir, and after I published it I was sick of myself,” writes Amy Jo Burns about why she turned to fiction. “I wanted to write other things about other people. I didn’t want so many limits; I sought fresh destinations for my imagination.”
Norman Mailer’s son, John Buffalo Mailer, is working with production company Hivemind on a TV series based on his father’s novel The Naked and the Dead. “Nearly 20 years ago my father entrusted the adaptation of The Naked And The Dead to me, but it was too epic a book to fit into a feature-length film, so we held off,” the younger Mailer explained. “Now, the new gilded age of television has enabled a big enough limited series to do it justice.”