At Lit Hub, Tarell Alvin McCraney introduces a new edition of Randall Kenan’s novel A Visitation of Spirits, out now from Grove Press. McCraney writes that Kenan “gives us back our wonder. True graceful wonder.”
Brandon Taylor is joining Unnamed Press as an acquiring editor. You can read Taylor’s essays on literature and culture at his newsletter Sweater Weather.
For the New Republic, Melissa Gira Grant writes about Pamela Paul’s New York Times op-ed “The Far Right and Far Left Agree on One Thing: Women Don’t Count.” Paul—an opinion editor at the Times who used to be the editor of the Book Review—argues that trans-inclusive organizations and activists have an “perhaps unintention[al] but effectively misogynist agenda,” that denies “women their humanity, reducing them to a mix of body parts and gender stereotypes.” Gira Grant calls the piece “a polite version of an extreme belief . . . that trans people are a powerful threat to women and womanhood. Now that the Times is presenting this notion to its largely liberal readers, we can expect to see a wider acceptance of such arguments in many other ‘respectable’ outlets.”
The New Yorker’s summer fiction double issue is out now, with a profile of French author Emmanuel Carrère, an early Shirley Jackson story, and new fiction by Bryan Washington, Rachel Kushner, and Ling Ma.
Washington Post book critic Carlos Lozada close-reads Supreme Court decisions in Roe v. Wade, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, finding that the high court has been politicized since long before the Dobbs opinion was leaked in May. However, Lozada writes that recently the rhetoric has grown ever more heated, as “different factions of the high court accuse one another and their predecessors of incompetence, duplicity, hypocrisy, and untruth.”