The six shortlisted novels for this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction are Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle, Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss, Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness, Lisa Allen-Agostini’s The Bread the Devil Knead, Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees, and Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence.
Poets & Writers announced yesterday that Sonia Sanchez—author of Homegirls and Handgrenades, I’ve Been a Woman, and many other collections—is the 2022 Jackson Poetry Prize recipient. Sanchez was chosen by the poet-judges Mary Jo Bang, Marilyn Chin, and Claudia Rankine, who wrote in their citation: “Her vast and commanding oeuvre of published poetry invokes the power and revolutionary properties of language itself—intoning the struggles and joys of entire communities while reinvigorating traditional forms.”
The new issue of The Point asks, “What is the military for?,” with a survey of veterans on military life, a conversation with Iraq War veteran Shoshana Johnson, and a host of essays: Cassandra Nelson considers “readiness” and abstraction; novelist Phil Klay writes about Wilfred Owen and the inherent problem of the “poet as witness”; Shaan Sachdev considers the military-industrial complex; and more.
Alisha Haridasani Gupta profiles Vauhini Vara for the New York Times. Vara is a former tech journalist and the author of the forthcoming novel The Immortal King Rao, which follows a low-caste boy from rural India who immigrates to the US and starts a personal computer business: the Coconut Computer Corporation. From there, things take a dystopian turn. The novel took eight years to write, and Vara reflects that “It’s almost like reality moved closer to what I imagined as a sort of speculative future in my book.”
Yesterday, Gary Indiana discussed his new essay collection, Fire Season, with critic Christian Lorentzen, at a virtual event presented by Paula Cooper Gallery and 192 Books. The conversation is now available to watch online.