Cormac McCarthy has two intertwined novels coming out from Knopf this fall, his first to be published since The Road in 2006. The Passenger and Stella Maris follow siblings Bobby and Alicia Western, who “are tormented by the legacy of their father, a physicist who helped develop the atom bomb, and by their love for and obsession with one another,” Alexandra Alter reports. McCarthy, who rarely gives interviews, has been working on this project for years. In a 2009 interview, he alluded to what seems to have become Stella Maris: “I was planning on writing about a woman for 50 years,” adding, “I will never be competent enough to do so, but at some point you have to try.”
Conjunctions, a biannual literary magazine that has published work by Rick Moody, John Ashbery, Kelly Link, and countless emerging writers since its founding in 1981, will lose its funding from Bard College at the end of the year.
For the New Left Review’s Sidecar blog, Mike Davis writes about climate change and the Anthropocene, and the “pathological presentism” and unimaginative global policies of world leaders: “Everyone is quoting Gramsci on the interregnum, but that assumes that something new will be or could be born. I doubt it. I think what we must diagnose instead is a ruling class brain tumour: a growing inability to achieve any coherent understanding of global change as a basis for defining common interests and formulating large-scale strategies.”
Alex Colston and Hannah Zeavin have launched The Psychosocial Foundation, a nonprofit organization “that exists to advance our understanding of where the social, political, and psychological converge.” They are in the process of fundraising for the first issue of a print magazine, Parapraxis, which will focus on psychoanalysis and the family.
At Poynter, Angela Fu discusses the findings of a new study investigating pay equity in more than a dozen unionized newsrooms of Tribune Publishing, covering 384 full-time editorial staff. The unions found evidence of racial and gender pay gaps, with the median salary of Black women staff being 22.5 percent less than what white men are paid by Tribune. The median pay for women is $8,355 less than the median pay for men.
New York Times Book Review editor Pamela Paul is becoming an opinion columnist for the paper. Paul is the author or editor of eight books and hosts the weekly book review podcast.