Maxine Hong Kingston. Photo: Michael Lionstar/Penguin Random House On Monday, June 13, Maxine Hong Kingston will be joined in an online conversation by Gish Jen, author of The Resisters, at 92Y to celebrate the publication of a Library of America edition of Kingston’s books The Woman Warrior, Tripmaster Monkey, China Men, and other collected writings.  For the New York Review of Books, doctor and poet Laura Kolbe considers three new books that explore pain’s origins and how we attempt to explain and quantify pain: “Our appetite for explanation is large, because most of us have at some point deeply

Haley Mlotek For Columbia Journalism Review, Haley Mlotek considers a new biography of Anna Wintour, and speaks with its author, Amy Odell. Anna: The Biography is a deeply-researched unauthorized account of theVogue editor’s decades-long reign of the fashion world. Mlotek writes, “By a few measures, she may be considered the ‘final’ boss. Yet as her influence has grown, so has the imperative for substantial critique and for reckoning with what her power means.” The Washington Monthly magazine has announced the finalists of its Kukula Award for Excellence in Nonfiction Book Reviewing. Among the ten finalists are Becca Rothfeld for her

Walter Abish. Photo: New Directions Walter Abish, the experimental novelist, poet, and author of the acclaimed 1980 novel How German Is It, has died at the age of ninety. “My work invites interpretation,” Abish said in 2004. “To provide explanations is to inhibit the reader’s interaction. Often to explain is to explain away.” In an essay for Criterion, Angelica Jade Bastién writes about Billy Wilder’s 1994 film Double Indemnity, the power of the femme fatale, and “the suggestion of the racialized other” in noir films. For more on Wilder, see A. S. Hamrah’s essay on his life and work

Sarah Jaffe. Photo: Janice Checchio.  Sarah Jaffe writes about photographer Vivian Maier for The Nation. Reviewing a new biographer of Maier, Jaffe observes that the author, like many Maier scholars before her, doesn’t know what to make of the photographer’s lack of careerism and her day job as a nanny: The “book still treats Maier’s life and art as a riddle to be solved rather than as the complicated and contradictory products of a formidable intellect.”  The new issue of Bookforum is online now! In a special summer section, we asked writers to contribute essays, reviews, and reflections on

Phil Klay. Photo: Hannah Dunphy  Geetanjali Shree and translator Daisy Rockwell have won the International Booker Prize for Translated Fiction for Tomb of Sand. It is the first novel originally written in Hindi to win the prize.  At BOMB, Mark Haber discusseses his new novel Saint Sebastian’s Abyss with Ryan Chapman. Haber’s novel follows two art critics and former best friends who meet after a long falling out. The author tells Chapman about his attraction to the idea of “absolute knowledge”: “Having characters fixate on something as small as a tiny canvas painting, making it the guidepost of their

Francis Fukuyama For the New Yorker, Krithika Varagur reviews Francis Fukuyama’s Liberalism and Its Discontents, the political scientist’s defensive revisiting of the influential ideas he proposed in his 1989 essay (and later, book) “The End of History.” Varagur writes, “Liberalism could scarcely imagine a better cheerleader in this bleak landscape than Fukuyama, who has a unique skill for imbuing a sometimes ponderous ideology with a narrative thrust.” For the latest episode of the Artforum/Bookforum video series “Artists On Writers | Writers On Artists,” Elif Batuman talks about her new novel, Either/Or, with artist Sibel Horada.  Jane Hu writes for

Brandon Taylor. Photo: Brandon Taylor At the Columbia Journalism Review, Jon Allsop rounds up and reflects on media coverage of the school shooting yesterday in Uvalde, Texas, and “all the horribly repetitive cadences” of the responses to the tragedy. Yesterday at Politico, Chris Suellentrop described mass shootings as “America’s copy and paste tragedy.” Allsop argues that “this repetition need not hamstring coverage; it can be grimly illustrative and, if framed correctly, even galvanizing.”  Critic Jasmine Sanders will be leading a reading group at the Center for Fiction on Margo Jefferson’s new memoir Constructing a Nervous System and Willa Cather’s Künstlerroman The Song of the

Elif Batuman. Photo: Valentyn Kuzan. At the New Republic, Sophie Haigney writes about Elif Batuman’s new novel, Either/Or: “One of Batuman’s abiding preoccupations is how literature intersects with life. She has expressed a general preference for nonfiction over contemporary fiction, for its ability to engage with reality.” At LitHub, Batuman talks about writing the book and the process of looking back at her college-age self: “When I look back at that time, it would be easy to say, oh, the wool was really pulled over my eyes and I was really tricked and I really fell for something and

Adrian Matejka Rowan Ricardo Phillips interviews Adrian Matejka, who was recently named the editor of Poetry, becoming the first Black person to hold the position in the magazine’s history. Matejka, whose books include Somebody Else Sold the World, shares his vision for the publication, saying that he wants to “make the magazine more inclusive and available while also developing its outward-facing component.” He continues: “I’m a believer in poetry as action as well as art. Some of my favorite poets do their best work in libraries and orchards and jazz clubs. I want the magazine to embody that public

Elaine Hsieh Chou. Photo: © Cindy Trinh For Liberties, Morton Høi Jensen reflects on what we expect from biographies, the “biographical fallacy,” and works of fiction that lean on biographical information. “All writers lead double lives: one on the page, one off,” Jensen writes. “And no account or portrait of a writer’s life will resolve this fissure. There will always be a scandalizing disproportion between the human messiness of a writer’s life and the size, the scope, and the opacity of their fictional work.” For the New York Times, Marc Tracy outlines how liberal cultural arbiters are responsible for

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò. Photo: Jared Rodriguez. For the London Review of Books, Hazel V. Carby compares Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project to a new HBO series directed by Raoul Peck, Exterminate All the Brutes, and reflects on the limited usefulness of the phrase “the afterlife of slavery” and the term “antiblackness” when used without historical specificity. Carby writes that The 1619 Project’s aim “places it firmly within the conventional narrative of American exceptionalism,” while Peck’s series “refuses to conform to narrative linearity, rejecting the idea that the current resurgence of white supremacist and state violence can be traced back

Eileen Myles. Photo: Shae Detar At Jewish Currents, Josh Lambert writes about some of the best new Jewish literature published in the last year that deals with questions of gender and sexual politics, including Melissa Broder’s Milk Fed, Sam Cohen’s Sarahland, and Hanna Halperin’s Something Wild.  New York Times city correspondent Alex Vadukul talks with poet and novelist Eileen Myles about their advocacy for the trees of East River Park, which is being demolished. Myles moved to New York in the 1970s, when “there was time to waste, and that’s the thing everybody deserves. And the park is wasted

Rick Perlstein Historian Rick Perlstein’s next book, The Infernal Triangle, has been sold to Little, Brown. In his new volume, Perlstein plans to track American politics from 2000 to the present, with an eye toward “Republican viciousness, Democratic fecklessness, and media incompetence.” Perlstein tweeted that the book will be available in time for the 2024 conventions. In 2020, Perlstein talked with Leon Neyfakh, Sam Adler-Bell, and Matthew Sitman about how the right keeps on winning.      The Atlantic has launched its expanded books coverage with essays by Vivian Gornick, Caitlin Flanagan, Imbolo Mbue, and more. For the latest installment of

Jelani Cobb. Photo: Calla Kessler Author and New Yorker staff writer Jelani Cobb has been named the new dean of the Columbia School of Journalism. Cobb, who has worked at Columbia since 2016 and is currently the director of the Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights, is the author of The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress, To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic, and other books.   Patricia Lockwood has won the £20,000 Dylan Thomas prize for her first novel, No One Is Talking About

Sara Nović. Photo: Zach Stone Bard College is reversing its decision to stop publishing Conjunctions, and has committed to publish the literary journal for three more years. Contributors to their forthcoming fall issue include Carmen Maria Machado, Yxta Maya Murray, Can Xue, and more.  At The Guardian, Sara Nović discusses the deaf writing community, her second novel, True Biz, and why ASL has been important to her as a deaf writer working in English: “Language bears more than the work of communicating with the mainstream world; it is also the internal vehicle for our thoughts and feelings, the mechanism

A. J. Verdelle The Washington Post is establishing a bureau in Kyiv to help cover the war in Ukraine. Isabelle Khurshudyan has been named bureau chief with Max Bearak as the lead Ukraine correspondent.   Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was killed while covering Israeli army raids in Jenin. Abu Akleh reported for Al Jazeera for twenty-five years. Dalia Hatuqa, a journalist and friend of Abu Akleh said in a New York Times article, “I know of a lot of girls who grew up basically standing in front of a mirror and holding their hair brushes and pretending to be

Meaghan Winter. Photo: Rose Lichter-Marck  The New York Review of Books is publishing a series of responses to the leaked Supreme Court draft decision that would overturn Roe v. Wade. Most recently, Meaghan Winter writes about how “Democrats have been defeatist about abortion for decades.” Among the other contributors are Charlotte Shane, Annette Gordon-Reed, Anne Enright, Liza Batkin, and more. The founders and former editors of The Believer have published a letter addressing the magazine’s new ownership by a firm called Paradise Media. The former owners at the University of Nevada Las Vegas announced in October 2021 that they

Joshua Cohen The 2022 Pulitzer Prizes have been announced: Joshua Cohen received the award for fiction, the late Winfred Rembert won a posthumous award for his illustrated autobiography (as told to Erin I. Kelly), and Diane Seuss won the poetry prize. Here’s a full list of winners.   For the New York Times, Jackson Arn reviews two new novels about art: Emily Hall’s The Longcut and Mark Haber’s Saint Sebastian’s Abyss. Arn writes, “Characters in novels about art . . . tend to be frauds: weaselly dealers, greedy collectors, hack painters and shallow critics who pretend art is about truth

Louise Glück. Photo: Katherine Wolkoff At Lit Hub, Jumi Bello writes about her mental illness, and how and why she plagiarized parts of her debut novel, The Leaving. The book was set to be published on July 12 but was canceled by Riverhead after it was revealed that the book contained multiple passages by other writers. In response, Gawker points out that this personal essay, too, “looks very plagiarized.”  Ukrainian author Artem Chapeye has sold his debut story collection, The Ukraine, to Seven Stories Press.  Zenia Tompkins will translate. The title story appeared in the New Yorker. Chapeye, who

Melissa Gira Grant. Photo: Verso Starting tonight, Metrograph theater in Manhattan is hosting a series, “Stumbling onto Wildness: Cookie Mueller on Film,” featuring films and events celebrating the late writer, actress, advice columnist, and downtown raconteur. This evening’s movie, “A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking,” is doubling as the book launch for a new Mueller collection and a new chapbook by Natasha Stagg.        For 4Columns, Beatrice Loayza writes about Happening, Audrey Diwan’s new film, which is based on Annie Ernaux’s memoir of getting an illegal abortion in 1963 France.  At the New Republic, Melissa Gira Grant discusses how