Paper Trail

Victor LaValle’s new comic-book series


Victor LaValle. Photo: Teddy Wolff

Boom Studios has announced that it will publish a new comic by novelist Victor LaValle (Big Machine, The Changeling, and The Devil in Silver) and artist Jo Mi-Gyeong. Eve, a five-issue series, will be released in May. Says LaValle: “What kind of planet are we leaving to our kids? This is the question that spawned my comic book. It’s an old one, of course. Many generations have wrestled with it, but the question has never been as immediate. But I didn’t want to write some grim story about how this joint went to hell. Instead, I wanted to write a story about how we let the planet fall apart and left it to the younger generations to fix it. So this a story, inspired by young folks like Mari Copeny, Elsa Mengistu, Greta Thunberg and so many more, of how an eleven-year-old girl, EVE, and her android teddy bear try to do the seemingly impossible: save the planet, save us.”

PBS’s American Masters series is devoting an episode to Flannery O’Connor. Premiering on March 23, the show will include archival footage, newly discovered journals, and interviews with authors Mary Karr, Hilton Als, Tobias Wolff, and Alice McDermot.

Publishers Weekly spotlights Talk Story, a brick-and-mortar in Hanapepe, Kauai. “The westernmost bookstore in the US,” it was, for almost a decade, the only bookstore on the island.

Author Susan Orlean offers a listicle on “behavior unique to the pandemic era that baffles me.”

Tomorrow (Tuesday) night at 8 PM EST, as part of The Harry Belafonte Black Liberation Speaker Series at the New York Public Library, columnist Charles Blow will discuss his new book, The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto, with Hilton Als (White Girls).

Starting on Wednesday this week, the Beinecke Rare Book Library and Public Humanities at Yale will cohost a virtual symposium on biography. On Wednesday at 1 PM EST, Langdon Hammer (James Merrill: Life and Art) will talk with poet and MacArthur Fellow Terrance Hayes (To Float in the Space Between: Drawings and Essays in Conversation with Etheridge Knight); on Thursday at 1 PM, Ruth Franklin (Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life) will be in conversation with Imani Perry (May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem); and on Friday, Hermione Lee (author of biographies of Virginia Woolf, Penelope Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, and Tom Stoppard) will talk with Stacy Schiff (Véra: Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov). You can register to view all of the events here.