At n+1 online, writers including Gregg Bordowitz, H. A. Sedgwick, Lauren Michele Jackson, Andrea Long Chu, and more remember Lauren Berlant, the pioneering author and theorist who died on June 28th. In her essay, Long Chu shares an email that Berlant sent her at the beginning of the pandemic: “Just checking in to see how you’re faring. How are you? I hope all of what’s intense is good, and all of what’s ordinary has lots of pleasures in it.”
At the New Yorker, Lauren Oyler profiles the celebrated German writer Jenny Erpenbeck: “The selection of detail is a foundation of good writing; specificity, we learn in composition class, is what conveys meaning. But, in her meditative accounting, Erpenbeck manages to transcend evocation and arrive at something larger, a mode in which nothing feels insignificant.”
Tonight at 8pm EDT, the National Book Critics Circle is holding a virtual panel, “Racial Consciousness in Literary Criticism,” featuring Erik Gleibermann, David Mura, Lisa Teasley, and Myriam Gurba.
The judges for the 2022 International Booker Prize have been announced: Frank Wynne, Merve Emre, Petina Gappah, Mel Giedroyc, and Jeremy Tiang.
In his Washington Post media column, Erik Wemple covers the latest conflict of interest disclosure from the New York Times.