Michelle Tea. Photo: Gretchen Sayers At Lit Hub, an excerpt from Michelle Tea’s Knocking Myself Up: A Memoir of My (In)Fertility, which was just published by Dey Street Books. Tea writes, “Although my friends’ anti-baby fears gave me the opportunity to try out my pro-baby arguments, the truth was, the dare to depart in this wild new direction existed inside my body alongside self-doubt, the economic scarcity issues that were my birthright, and basic terror of the unknown.”  At The Baffler, Rhian Sasseen considers the late Japanese sci-fi writer Izumi Suzuki, whose stories appear for the first time in

Nuar Alsadir. Photo: Deborah Copaken Kogan Thomas Nelson Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Christian publishing, is releasing a new memoir by US Senator Tim Scott, America, a Redemption Story, on August 9. The copyright page states that the South Carolina Republican is preparing a presidential bid for the 2024 election. The publisher is now saying that Scott did not sign off on this declaration, and that printing it was a mistake. “The description on the copyright page was our error and is not accurate. It was not done at the direction or approval of the Senator or his team.

Gilbert Cruz. Photo: Tony Cenicola/The New York Times Gilbert Cruz, the Culture editor of the New York Times, will be the paper’s next Books editor, succeeding Pamela Paul. In a press release, the Times announced that Cruz will work to “reimagine The New York Times Book Review, the nation’s last stand-alone newspaper book-review section, for the digital age.”  Art in America’s second annual Summer Reading issue is out now, with Jackson Arn on artist biographies, Hannah Stamler on children’s books by artists, Lucy Ives on indie presses and self-publishing projects, and more.  Lincoln Michel has started a Twitter thread

Hannah Zeavin The Robert B. Silvers Foundation has announced the recipients of its 2022 grants. The winners include Hannah Zeavin, Christian Lorentzen, Damion Searls, Stephen F. Kearse, and Urmila Seshagiri, among others. For the Verso Books blog, Francesca Peacock writes about the politics of Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg: “Given Ginzburg’s life-long saturation in left-wing politics, why is it now so easy to read her fiction entirely divorced from this context? Part of the reason lies with Ginzburg herself: in her writing, she was unfailingly self-deprecating about her own political knowledge.” For more on Ginzburg, see Emily LaBarge’s 2017 review

Tiya Miles. Photo: © Kimberly P. Mitchell – USA TODAY NETWORK/Penguin Random House Yale has announced the finalists of this year’s Frederick Douglass Book Prize, which recognizes outstanding books “on slavery, resistance, and/or abolition.” The finalists are Tiya Miles’s All That She Carried, Jennifer L. Morgan’s Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic, and Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh’s The Souls of Womenfolk.  For the New Republic, Scott Bradfield writes about Frank O’Hara’s circle and the joyous nonchalance of his poetry, and considers Ada Calhoun’s Also a Poet. Calhoun’s new book is part biography and part memoir,

Mike Davis. Photo: Wikimedia Commons The Booker Prize longlist of thirteen writers has been announced. The shortlist will be released on September 6, with the final award given on October 17. Barack Obama has tweeted his summer reading list. The former president has been reading Jennifer Egan, Emily St. John Mandel, Ezra Klein, Hanif Abdurraqib, and more.   At the Los Angeles Times, Sam Dean interviews historian and activist Mike Davis about his life and career. Davis, the author of more than a dozen books, has terminal esophageal cancer. He told Dean, “I’m just extraordinarily furious and angry. If I

Chloé Cooper Jones. Photo: Andrew-Grossardt The US Department of Justice is going to court in an attempt to block Penguin Random House’s attempt to acquire its rival publisher Simon Schuster, calling the consolidation a violation of antitrust laws. Oral arguments will begin on August 1. Penguin Random House has purchased Michelle Obama’s The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times, which will be published by the Crown imprint on November 15. According to the publisher, the book, which will have a first printing of 2.75 million copies, is “a series of fresh stories and insightful reflections on change, challenge,

Jon Raymond. Photo: © Michael Palmieri For the New Yorker, Molly Fischer revisits Susan Faludi’s 1991 feminist text Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. Fischer writes, “In the early nineties, Faludi situated the backlash within an ongoing cycle of feminist boom and bust in American history: periods of reactionary hostility toward feminism followed periods of widespread embrace.”   In her The Present Age newsletter, Parker Molloy looks at Issac Chotiner’s New Yorker interview with Alan Dershowitz. Molloy admires how Chotiner fact-checks some of the Dershowitz’s claims in the text itself. She observes that this is surprisingly rare: “For

N. Scott Momaday The New York Times profiles Hell Gate, a New York City news site that is owned by the journalists who work there. Founded in 2021 by veterans of publications like Gothamist, the Village Voice, and Jezebel, Hell Gate is dedicated to “that thing every New Yorker has passed walking down the street, that fleeting, only-in-New-York moment that everyone wonders about but doesn’t understand.”   Dana Canedy, a senior vice president and publisher at Simon Schuster is leaving the company. Canedy will be working on a sequel to her memoir, A Journal for Jordan, which SS is planning

Jamil Jan Kochai. Photo: Jalil Kochai. On NPR’s All Things Considered, Jamil Jan Kochai discusses his new story collection, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and other Stories.  For Columbia Journalism Review, Karen Maniraho talks to five reporters about covering life online. Ryan Broderick, author of the Garbage Day newsletter about web culture, tells Maniraho, “Of the tech-culture reporters I’ve spoken to over the last couple of years, we’ve all said that every story feels like this Russian nesting doll of weird specializations.” The HarperCollins Union went on strike today. Lindsay Zoladz has announced that she’s sold her first book,

Patrick Radden Keefe. Photo: Ilene Squires.  At the New York Times, a roundup of eighty-eight books to read this summer, including picks in sports, music, travel, romance, cooking, and more.   For Harper’s Magazine, Christian Lorentzen revisits the work of Christopher Hitchens as a new collection of his writing for the London Review of Books has just been published. Lorentzen observes that Hitchens’s “reputation is now weighted toward the work of his last decade—the turn right, the God bashing, and the public succumbing to cancer. It was during this era that he became a celebrity.” But, he writes, A Hitch

LaToya Watkins (photo: Chanel Mitchell) Texas Monthly has published a package of articles that offer “ten reasons to believe we’re living in the golden age of Texas fiction.” Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, suggests that a “new wave” of writers is confronting the Lone Star State’s bloody history and “Anglo triumphalism.” Other articles highlight the state’s deeply gothic settings, Gabino Iglesias’s new horror novel The Devil Takes You Home, and the fiction of LaToya Watkins, whose debut novel, Perish, will be released next month.  Civitella Renieri has announced its new writing fellows, who include Hua

Fernando Pessoa Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel has posted a video of a recent event at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn: a conversation between Paisley Currah and Andrea Long Chu on Currah’s new book, Sex Is as Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity.  At Vulture, a roundup of the best books of 2022 so far. Some of the picks include Sheila Heti’s Pure Colour,  Dan Charnas’s Dilla Time, and Olga Ravn’s The Employees.  Roger Hodge has been named the acting editor-in-chief for The Intercept. Betsy Reed, the former EIC, left to become the editor of the Guardian US.   At The Nation,

Paula Fox. Photo: HarperCollins UK  For T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Sigrid Nunez writes about Paula Fox’s 1970 novel Desperate Characters. It begins with Sophie Bentwood being bitten by a stray—and possibly rabid—cat; readers are “kept in suspense,” Nunez writes, as to “why Sophie, an intelligent and educated woman, would rather deny the problem, even as her hand swells and throbs, than seek medical advice.” After reading the novel in 1991, Nunez recommended it to Jonathan Franzen, who helped bring about the 1999 reissue. Fox, who also published over twenty books for children, reflected on her newfound

Akhil Sharma. Photo: Jack Llewellyn For the New York Times, Wyatt Mason writes about Akhil Sharma, who rewrote his first novel, An Obedient Father, more than twenty years after it was published.  The Wired union, which represents the staff at the technology magazine, has won its first contract after planning a strike.  The Getty has opened The Black History Culture Collection, a free resource of thirty thousand images from the Black diaspora in the US and UK.  For The Nation, Lily Meyer writes about the late Danish author Tove Ditlevsen and the challenge of translating her unadorned, unsentimental work.

Ada Limón. Photo: Lucas Marquardt Ada Limón, the author most recently of the collection The Hurting Kind, has been named the twenty-fourth US poet laureate. “Poetry is a way back in, to recognizing that we are feeling human beings,” Limón told the New York Times. “And feeling grief and feeling trauma can actually allow us to feel joy again.” At The Nation, Kevin Lozano writes about the decline of American glossy magazines in a review of former Vanity Fair editor Dana Brown’s memoir Dilettante: “While Vanity Fair, Vogue, Elle, and the like still carry some cachet, they are no

Hrishikesh Hirway In August, musician Hrishikesh Hirway, creator of the Song Exploder podcast, will launch a new miniseries titled Book Exploder, on which “authors break down a passage from their work to show us how they write.” The lineup so far includes Susan Orlean, Min Jin Lee, George Saunders, Carman Maria Machado, Celeste Ng, and Tayari Jones. Random House has purchased Ana Marie Cox’s memoir Just Like Your Mother, in which the author, who writes the “Sober Questioning” column for The Cut, dwells on her alcoholism, her recovery, and her difficult relationship with her mother, also an alcoholic; Random

Elvia Wilk. Photo: Nina Subin/Soft Skull Press The latest issue of Columbia Journalism Review, titled “The Everything Virus,” is anchored by Jon Allsop’s media reporting and takes stock of how the COVID-19 pandemic has been covered over the last two and a half years.  n+1 has published an excerpt from Elvia Wilk’s forthcoming essay collection, Death by Landscape, in which she reflects on writing, rewriting, and even reenacting her debut novel, Oval: “Even for those writers who have every paragraph outlined before they begin (not me), there remains a tiny element of the unknown when you set the simulation

Carmen Giménez. Photo: Jason Gardner Photography Carmen Giménez has been announced as the new executive director and publisher of Graywolf Press, succeeding Fiona McCrae. Giménez is the founder of the literary nonprofit Noemi Press and the author of the poetry collection Be Recorder, which Graywolf published in 2019. She will begin her new role on August 8.  For the Paris Review, Elisa Gabbert writes about fame, obscurity, and the appeal of “Why I Write” essays: “Some days I think the very question is banal, like photos of a writer’s ‘workspace.’ They’re all just desks! Why write? Why do anything?

Randall Kenan At Lit Hub, Tarell Alvin McCraney introduces a new edition of Randall Kenan’s novel A Visitation of Spirits, out now from Grove Press. McCraney writes that Kenan “gives us back our wonder. True graceful wonder.”  Brandon Taylor is joining Unnamed Press as an acquiring editor. You can read Taylor’s essays on literature and culture at his newsletter Sweater Weather.  For the New Republic, Melissa Gira Grant writes about Pamela Paul’s New York Times op-ed “The Far Right and Far Left Agree on One Thing: Women Don’t Count.” Paul—an opinion editor at the Times who used to be