The National Book Awards will be announced in a ceremony in New York tomorrow night (Wednesday) at 8pm EST. The event, hosted by Padma Lakshmi, will be streamed online.
For the Baffler, Hannah Gold reports from a gallery preview of the Joan Didion auction, which will go live tomorrow at 11am. Gold writes, “For those of us without thousands to spend on blank notebooks or hurricane lamps, there is hope for an encounter with Didion: the auction is, of course, for items culled from the second pass of the apartment; the materials that best capture her reading, drafting, and writing create a loud absence in the blue showrooms.”
For Gizmodo, Matt Novak considers a recent New York Times article about Sam Bankman-Fried, the CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which just filed for bankruptcy. Novak wonders about the positive spin the article gives Bankman-Fried, considering the circumstances: “The interview with SBF, as he’s often called, is presented with such a gauzy lens that you have to start wondering what the hell is going on with crypto reporting at the Times.”
Time magazine lists one-hundred must-read books for 2022.
Events tonight in New York: Harper’s Magazine and Duke University Press will host an in-person conversation about basketball and writing featuring Thomas Beller (author of the new book Lost in the Game) and Alex Wolff (author of Big Game Small World); at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, Ken Chen will be in conversation with New Yorker writer Hua Hsu about Hsu’s new book Stay True, a “memoir on friendship, grief, the search for self, and the solace that can be found through art.”
For Parapraxis magazine, Hannah Zeavin meditates on the children of psychoanalysts, writing about Anna Freud and Zeavin’s own childhood with analyst parents: “Psychoanalysts have long watched their children—noting their development, their dreams, their symptoms—to universalize the Family from their families.”