LitHub reports on the PEN Awards and World Voices festival, which “are on the brink of collapse” over the organization’s response to Gaza. So far, twenty-nine authors have withdrawn from consideration for the prizes, including nine of the ten nominees PEN/Jean Stein Award, which pays $75,000.
In The Nation, Gaby Del Valle reviews Jonathan Blitzer’s new book, Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis, about the crisis at the US southern border.
Authors Lauren Groff and James McBride are among Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” of the year.
On the New Left Review’s Sidecar, Huda Awan writes about novelist Susan Taubes, the author of Divorcing, which was recently reissued by New York Review Books. Awan writes, “Her narratives are less accounts of their protagonists’ lives than of their failures—failures that begin with an inability to express who they are, how they feel and what they want.”
In the Paris Review Daily, Kate Dwyer interviews Anne Carson about her recent book Wrong Norma. When asked about the “wrong” in the title, Carson says, “When people ask me, ‘How are Canadians different from Americans?’ I say, ‘Canadians have one characteristic: they’re polite, but wrong.’ All the time, polite but wrong.” For more on Carson, see Jennifer Krasinski’s review of Wrong Norma in our winter issue.