Tonight, join us as we host the first episode of our new video series, “Off the Page,” featuring Margo Jefferson and Blair McClendon live in conversation. The virtual event is free if you RSVP here. Reviewing Jefferson’s new memoir, Constructing a Nervous System, for the spring issue of Bookforum, McClendon notes that for this book, Jefferson tried a new conception of autobiography: “Rather than using her life’s narrative to structure the book, she organizes her becoming through her models. Who, she asks herself, were those people she secreted away? In whose eyes did she see herself reflected?”
Pantheon Books has acquired The Revolution Is Here, a memoir by Amazon Labor Union president Chris Smalls.
For SSENSE, Jo Livingstone considers the origins and evolution of the celebrity memoir. “Today, even as social media supposedly tramples all over the values of good old-fashioned American screen entertainment, the celebrity memoir is in a state of lush flowering,” Livingstone writes, concluding that “detail is what the reader lusts after now.” Where celebrity memoirists once delivered “the longed-for glimpse behind the curtain of fame,” now they “must describe what it’s like to live back there.”
Deadline reports that the Washington Post is forming a partnership with Imagine Entertainment to create film and TV projects from the Post’s journalism.
For Astra magazine, Ruby Sutton files a dispatch from the Cannes Film Festival: “Even in our best clothes, it’s not possible to get into the real parties. Sometimes the French gatekeepers say everything is impossible at first, then change their mind, if you stand and stare at them for a minute. But both of us can tell this is not one of those instances.”
On Thursday, June 16 (which is “Bloomsday”), the New School is hosting Caveh Zahedi’s Ulysses and I, a theatrical celebration of Joyce’s novel.