Claire-Louise Bennett For The Baffler, Rhian Sasseen looks at Claire-Louise Bennett’s new novel Checkout 19 and the literature of the supermarket: “If the pandemic has made one thing clear, it’s that it is in the aisles of the supermarket where society’s biggest problems and anxieties mingle.” The Guardian has released new social-media guidelines for staff, including prohibitions against putting scoops on Twitter, criticizing colleagues, and a warning that it’s a bad idea to Tweet “partisan” opinions. In The Nation, Alex Jen writes about photographer An-My Lê.  Electric Literature has a newly translated story by the late Danish author Tove

Volodymyr Zelensky. Photo: Ukrainian Presidential Press Service. For The Cut, Rebecca Traister looks at the Democratic party’s flawed approach to abortion politics and the ways in which it has lost the messaging war: “While Republicans could commit to their bit with theatrical force, the left has been unwilling to embrace the real, nonfiction, moral urgency of their cause.”  On May 5, Lux magazine and Haymarket books are hosting “Feminists vs. the War Machine,” a panel featuring Rozina Ali, Margo Okazawa-Re, Sophie Pinkham, and Sarah Leonard.  The New York Times has released its first-quarter report on subscribers and revenue. The

Gerald Murnane. Photo: Ian Hill The new issue of The Baffler is out now, featuring Shamira Ibrahim on the working class, Molly Osberg on Starbuck CEO’s union-busting tactics, Dan Albert on the politics of mass transit in the US, Max Nelson on the East German writer Brigette Reiman, Charlie Lee on Halldór Laxness’s political fictions, and more.  For Vulture, Max Pearl profiles Mexican novelist Fernanda Melchor, the author most recently of Paradais. Melchor first explored the themes she writes about while in journalism school, and her fiction is often compared to noir and true-crime. “I’m a story collector,” she

John Keene. Photo: Nina Subin At Politico, Max Tani points out that Julie Pace and Darlene Superville’s Jill: A Biography of the First Lady, released by Little, Brown in April, sold only about two hundred and fifty copies in its first week. Pace and Superville are White House correspondents, and according to Tani, their book’s sluggish sales is just one example of how covering the White House in the age of Biden has “become a bore.”  Another run of Matthew Gasda’s play Dimes Square, the cast of which includes book critic Christian Lorentzen, has been scheduled for late May.

Elizabeth McCracken. Photo: ​​Edward Carey At Black Perspectives, the blog of the African American Intellectual History Society, Robert Greene II recommends a handful of books coming out this spring and summer, including Irvin J. Hunt’s Dreaming the Present, Marcy J. Dinus’s The Textual Effects of David Walker’s “Appeal”, and Jeremy Schipper’s Denmark Vesey’s Bible.  Deadline reports that Andy Serkis will direct Nick Hornby’s film adaptation of Elizabeth McCracken’s 1996 novel The Giant’s House.   For the New Republic, Osita Nwanevu writes about how films about the political system and D.C. politics—like Michael Ritchie’s The Candidate (1972) and Mick Nichols’s Primary

Leslie Jamison In Astra magazine, Leslie Jamison writes about daydreams: “I’ve spent my whole life daydreaming. It embarrasses me to think of tallying the hours. It feels like ingratitude. It feels like infidelity. It’s often been about infidelity.” It’s the publication’s first issue, with stories by Catherine Lacey, Fernanda Melchor, Ottessa Moshfegh, and more.  At n+1, Judith Levine reports from a labor rally at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island: “The brisk air vibrated with militant rank-and-file socialist unionism.”  For “24 Twitter Moments We Treasure: Sure, it’s hell. But what about the magic?” in Intelligencer, writers round up the best

Ruth Ozeki  The six shortlisted novels for this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction are Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle, Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss, Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness, Lisa Allen-Agostini’s The Bread the Devil Knead, Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees, and Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence.  Poets Writers announced yesterday that Sonia Sanchez—author of Homegirls and Handgrenades, I’ve Been a Woman, and many other collections—is the 2022 Jackson Poetry Prize recipient. Sanchez was chosen by the poet-judges Mary Jo Bang, Marilyn Chin, and Claudia Rankine, who wrote in their citation: “Her vast and commanding oeuvre

Jedediah Britton-Purdy Yesterday, Twitter accepted a bid worth about $44 billion from Elon Musk to buy Twitter. Musk intends to take the company private and plans to institute changes including loosening rules around speech on the platform, making the algorithm open source, and “authenticat[ing] all humans.” In GQ, Chris Stokel-Walker looks at what these changes could mean. At Slate, Alex Kirshner points out, “I do not think Musk thought this through. He only has stressful, annoying, and expensive paths ahead of him.” The winners of the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes have been announced. You can watch the ceremony

Ada Calhoun. Photo: Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet At The Nation, Kyle Paoletta considers the history of the New York Times Book Review and ponders its future. Now that editor Pamela Paul has moved to the paper’s op-ed desk, questions linger about what direction the Book Review will take: “Will the Times recommit to recommendations and reviews that double as ready-made blurbs in an effort to win over an audience that might not actually be interested in reading about books?” Paoletta asks. “Or will it publish the kind of criticism that appeals to readers who don’t require an approaching book club deadline

Mieko Kawakami At the Financial Times, Grace Cook talks with Torrey Peters, Mieko Kawakami, Megan Nolan, Hafsa Zayyan, and Brenda Navarro about the spaces where they write. Navarro can write anywhere as long as she has solitude and headphones, and told Cook, “Writer’s block is a thing for men with time.”  For the New Yorker, Naaman Zhou writes about a Twitter account that documents second mentions, or elegant variations, in writing. For example, an article in The Guardian once described a fox who interrupted a soccer game by running onto the field as “the four-legged interloper.” Zhou notes that

Eileen Myles. Photo: Shae Detar In the Culture issue of T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Nancy Coleman, Kate Guadagnino, Thessaly La Force, M. H. Miller, Mallika Rao, and others interview artists and writers about their process. Among the many interviewees are Don Mee Choi, Brontez Purnell, Kevin Young, Eileen Myles, and Ayana Mathis.  For The Nation, Kyle Paoletta looks at the past and future of the New York Times Book Review, as it looks for a new editor following the departure of Pamela Paul, who has become an opinion columnist. Paoletta writes, “With no successor yet announced, the

Garth Greenwell. Photo: Macmillan In BOMB magazine, a conversation between Madelaine Lucas and Jessica Au, whose new novel, Cold Enough for Snow, has won the Novel Prize. Au tells Lucas, “I often think that to really answer a serious question, I would have to write a novel to explain why I think the way I think, or what’s formed me. . . . You would need so much context and backstory to fully have another consciousness recognize your own.” In “Eric Adams’s Moral Panics,” Kay Gabriel writes for Jewish Currents about the New York City mayor’s approach to crime

Elif Batuman. Photo: Valentyn Kuzan. Jennifer Wilson reviews Elif Batuman’s second novel, Either/Or, for The Atlantic. A sequel to The Idiot, Either/Or follows Selin, now a literature major at Harvard, in her pursuit of the aesthetic life. While collecting experiences she plans to use as material for a novel, Selin ponders the “ethics of being an autobiographical-writer-in-the-making.” Wilson notes that “the simplicity of the experience-for-art’s-sake mantra is itself a clue that the cerebral Selin will soon grow suspicious of it.”  On April 13, Bennington College hosted an in-person event titled “How to Be an Art Monster.” Moderated by author

Kathryn Schulz. Photo:  Michael Polito.  At the New York Times, Alexandra Alter profiles the iconoclastic, dystopian Russian novelist Vladimir Sorokin, as American publishers plan to publish eight new translations of his books. “The attention comes as his portraits of Russia as a decaying former empire that’s sliding backward under a militaristic, violent and repressive regime have come to seem tragically prescient,” Alter writes. “As Russia carries out its brutal invasion of Ukraine, Sorokin sees the conflict not just as a military onslaught, but as a semantic war being waged through propaganda and lies—an assault on truth that writers must

Elisa Gabbert. Photo: Adrianne Mathiowetz The New York Public Library has announced the finalists for the 2022 Young Lions Fiction Award. The New York Times Book Review has dedicated an issue to poetry for National Poetry Month: Elisa Gabbert writes about the difficulty of defining exactly what makes a poem, Stephanie Burt reviews Linda Gregerson, Daisy Fried revisits the work of Nelly Sachs, and more.  The deadline for the FSG Writer’s Fellowship has been extended until April 22. The program offers support to writers from underrepresented communities including mentorship and ta $15,000 award. The judges this year are Sheila

Jennifer Egan. Photo: Pieter M. Van Hattem. Elon Musk has launched a $43-billion-dollar cash bid to buy Twitter. Bloomberg reports: “Unsatisfied with the influence that comes with being Twitter’s largest investor, he has now launched a full takeover, one of the few individuals who can afford it outright.” In The Nation, professor Victor Pickard writes about why it’s a bad idea for billionaires to have control over social-media platforms, which have become de facto public utilities.   The BuzzFeed News union has announced that it has tentatively agreed to a contract after two years of bargaining.  In the Los

Alexandra Chang. Photo: Alana Davis The National Book Foundation has announced its 2022 “5 Under 35,” the award for young authors to watch. At Vulture, Hillary Kelly discusses the nominees.  The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books is back this year with indoor and outdoor author events at the University of Southern California during the weekend of April 23–24. General admission tickets for talks with Joy Williams, Jonathan Lethem, Clint Smith, Imani Perry, Melissa Febos, and more will be available starting April 17.  At GQ, Gabriella Paiella interviews Adrien Chiles, “the internet’s most delightful columnist,” who is known for

Nina MacLaughlin. Photo: Kelly Davidson Nina MacLaughlin, the author most recently of Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung, is working on a project writing short fictions based on the sculptor Richard Serra’s 1967 list of verbs and concepts. Online at n+1, you can read an excerpt comprising three sections: “To Dapple,” “To Remove,” and “To Store.”  In the new issue of the New Yorker, comic artist Joe Sacco illustrates a story by Russian graphic artist Victoria Lomasko. In the opening panel, Sacco explains that Lomasko had to flee Moscow and leave her art supplies behind. In their collaboration, “The Collective Shame

Ocean Vuong. Photo: Tom Hines Peter Maass, the author of Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War, writes about Ron Haviv’s photographs of a Kyiv suburb, which depict cars, bicycles, strollers, and other objects abandoned by Ukrainians desperately trying to flee the war. “These photos tell us the beginnings of stories that we dread following to their ends. There is a cane on the ground—what happened to its owner? Were they scooped up by a relative who realized their grandmother or grandfather was moving too slowly to survive the bombs? Did they fall by the roadside, alone? Their body,

Hernan Diaz. Photo: Pascal Perich The new class of Guggenheim Fellows has been announced. The 2022 fellows in fiction and nonfiction include Jennifer Croft, Alexandra Kleeman, Hernan Diaz, Brandon Hobson, Maaza Mengiste, Christopher Sorrentino, and Melissa Febos, among others.  At Gawker, Erin Somers notes an uptick in critics’ use of the German term “Künstlerroman.” Somers first noticed the word in Hermione Hoby’s Bookforum review of Sean Thor Conroe’s novel Fuccboi, and has since endeavored to find the source of what seems to be a trend. According to Somers, that credit goes to Sam Lipsyte, who reminded her never to