The White Review, the London literary magazine founded in 2011 by Ben Eastham and Fitzcarraldo Editions publisher Jacques Testard, is indefinitely pausing its day-to-day publishing operations, citing lack of funding and the cost of living crisis. The board of trustees is now seeking consultation as to the magazine’s future. In a statement, the Review thanks its outgoing staff and contributors, including Claire-Louise Bennett, Legacy Russell, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Fernanda Melchor, Sally Rooney, Brandon Taylor, Anne Carson, Joshua Cohen, among many others.
The Writers Guild of America has reached a tentative deal with Hollywood studios. At Jacobin, Alex Press writes about what a contract might include—protections concerning the use of AI and residual bonuses for streamers—but notes: “The bargaining committee says the deal is ‘exceptional.’ For now, anything beyond that is speculation.” As of today, WGA members are still on strike, and upholding a press blackout as union leadership takes steps to finalize language and decide whether to send the deal out to rank-and-file members to vote for or against ratifying it.
Bookforum contributor Ryan Ruby has sold two books: Ringbahn: On Berlin Time, a travelogue, intellectual history, and “ode to the mass transit system of the author’s adopted home” will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux; and Context Collapse, a “blank verse history of Western poetry” will be published by Seven Stories Press.
In a preview from the upcoming issue of the LARB Quarterly, Katie Kadue writes about misogynist humor, from John Donne’s “The Flea” to Bo Burnham’s comedy special Inside. “Misogynist jokes, like all misogynist discourse, are usually unoriginal and derivative, as derivative as Eve from Adam’s rib, as unoriginal as sin. I like these jokes because there’s something comfortingly familiar, to the literary critic, in their structure, something that makes them work like 17th-century poems, or like 20th-century romantic comedies, or like certain generic personal experiences that only make sense to me as jokes.”
Join Bookforum at the Brooklyn Book Festival’s literary marketplace this Sunday at Borough Hall! The festival is also hosting author events and panels—that schedule is here.