Merve Emre. Photo: © Christian Nakarado  For the New Yorker, Merve Emre writes about James Joyce’s Ulysses, which was published one hundred years ago. Considering just two sentences from early in the novel, Emre wonders: “Is the yellow gown an afterimage of Homer’s Dawn, flinging off her golden robe? What to make of that peculiar word ‘ungirdled’? The cords of the ungirdled gown draw my mind to the ungirdled tunics of the warriors in the Iliad; to Shakespeare’s fairy Puck, who boasts that he can ‘put a girdle round about the earth / in forty minutes’; to the plump,

Toril Moi. Photo: Susannah B. F. Paletz.  At The Point, a conversation with professor and critic Toril Moi about academic writing and being a public intellectual. Moi believes that every article should be interesting and fun to read, and urges her students to not hide behind theory. Moi tells interviewer Jessica Swoboda: “When theory is just applied to a text, it’s being treated as a security blanket that protects you from having to reveal yourself. If that’s the case, whatever you’re writing will always be bad, at least in the sense that it will be utterly predictable.” The Authors

Dan Charnas. Photo: Noah Stephens Critic Christian Lorentzen is launching a Substack newsletter sometime this week.  The New York Review of Books has posted an interview with contributor Laura Marsh: “For me, it’s always been the feeling, after finishing a book or a film, of needing to know more and to talk to people about it—to understand why you like something, or why it bothered you.” Thomas Beard, the cofounder of the film and arts space Light Industries, has opened a once-a-week pop-up book store, which draws from his extensive book collection. “This isn’t really a business—it’s a slow-motion

Lauren Oyler. Photo: Pete Voelker Lauren Oyler’s debut novel, Fake Accounts, is being adapted for TV by High Maintenance cocreator Ben Sinclair and playwright Jen Silverman. Oyler will be an executive producer of the series.  For the New Yorker, Charlie Tyson writes about Elizabeth Taylor’s 1971 novel Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, which is being reissued by New York Review Books. Since its inception, Tyson writes, the novel as a form has favored young, upwardly mobile protagonists. But Taylor’s “account of aging suggests that literature may, in fact, be a more crucial form for the old than for the

Dan Charnas  The Dylan Thomas Prize longlist has been announced by Swansea University. The twelve nominees include Patricia Lockwood, Anuk Arudpragasam, and Brandon Taylor.   At Catapult, an interview with Publisher’s Brunch, an Instagram meme account and online community focused on working in the industry. The anonymous creator of the account told Catapult’s Matt Ortile: “I think the power of comedy can’t be overstated! Memes provide an outlet for sharing our collective experiences, from the good (free books) to the bad (racism, sexism, inequity, etc). Publishing woes, but make it funny!” Christian Lorentzen has started a newsletter. In his opening

Isaac Butler. Photo: The New School For the London Review of Books, Namara Smith writes about Joyce Carol Oates’s latest novel, Breathe, and her larger body of work: “Some of her finest descriptive writing is about boxing, a sport she has watched since her father took her to Golden Gloves fights when she was a child. Oates sees the boxing ring as a site where spontaneity must emerge out of a tightly disciplined structure. Boxing, she points out, is as much about losing as winning.” New York Times Book Review critic Jennifer Wilson talks with the editors of the

Taylor Lorenz Taylor Lorenz is leaving the New York Times to join the Washington Post. Lorenz has become the go-to reporter for all things online. Speaking about the Times’s apparent frustration with how she uses social media, she told Vanity Fair, “I use the internet as a modern internet person. These are tensions that are going to play out in any legacy newsroom in different ways.”  In the New Yorker, Anna Holmes writes about Margaret Wise Brown, the author of the children’s book Goodnight Moon. Holmes observes, “Brown helped create a new type of children’s literature that provided both

Chuck Klosterman. Photo: Kris Drake For the New Yorker, Frank Guan writes about Chuck Klosterman’s latest book, The Nineties: “More rerun than revisionism, Klosterman’s history takes its stand against the millennial urge to reassess the nineties (or the generation claiming ownership of them) in the harsh light of later events. If Gen X disengagement and ironic fence-sitting were brought up short by Bush v. Gore and 9/11 and the rise of social media, he wants to preserve the nineties as a safe space for his cohort.” In the latest installment of Artforum and Bookforum’s Artists and Writers series, novelist

Olga Tokarczuk. © Lukasz Giza A school district in Tennessee has voted to ban Art Speigelman’s Pulitzer-winning graphic novel, Maus, which depicts the Holocaust in a story about the author’s relationship with his father. The board took issue with a handful of curse words in the book and an image of a nude woman. Speigelman has called this focus “myopic” and told CNN that the decision “has the breath of autocracy and fascism about it.”  Clio Chang and Katie McDonough are moving to New York magazine’s Curbed. Chang, most recently a freelance writer, will cover “New York City’s built

Hua Hsu. Photo: Karl Rabe/Vassar College New Yorker writer Hua Hsu has announced a new memoir coming out in September called Stay True.  This week, journalists throughout Mexico are holding vigils and protests, as three media workers have been killed this month. The Committee to Protect Journalists has said that Mexico is one of the most dangerous countries for reporters. At a vigil in Mexico City,  Oscar Luna said of the murders, “It’s infuriating, it’s enraging, because journalists always give our soul, our heart, our body. From one moment to the next, they take away that passion, that commitment,

Hanif Abdurraqib. Photo: Megan Leigh Barnard PEN America has announced the finalists for its 2022 literary awards. Among the finalists are Percival Everett (The Trees), Joy Williams (Harrow), Elissa Washuta (White Magic), Torrey Peters (Detransition, Baby), and Hanif Abdurraqib (A Little Devil in America).  Tomorrow at 7pm Eastern time, n+1 will host Ari Brostoff for a discussion of their debut essay collection, Missing Time, with novelist Alexandra Kleeman and n+1 editors Dayna Tortorici and Mark Krotov. Brostoff’s collection includes essays on The X-Files, Philip Roth, Vivian Gornick, and more. You can read an excerpt from the book’s introduction here. For

Kim Stanley Robinson Joshua Rothman profiles sci-fi author Kim Stanley Robinson. In novels like New York 2140, The Ministry for the Future, and the books of the Mars trilogy, Robinson imagines dystopian worlds with utopian-like solutions. Rothman observes, “Robinson learned to write credible utopian fiction in part through a fractal sort of thinking, connecting the personal to the planetary.”   Colm Tóibín has been named the Laureate for Irish Fiction by the nation’s Arts Council. Tóibín said of the award, “I will do what I can to work with a community of readers so that fiction continues to enrich our

Celeste Ng. © Kieran Kesner At Vulture, Matt Zoller Seitz has written a wonderful tribute to critic Terry Teachout, whose books include biographies of George Balanchine, H. L. Mencken, and Duke Ellington. “Terry believed you could find good art almost anywhere, and that you would be more likely to believe this if more big-city journalists would make a commitment to leave their regional comfort zones and seek it out,” Seitz writes. “In my conversations with him, he sometimes referred to this philosophy as ‘truffle-hunting,’ because ‘you’re not going to experience a lot of the good stuff if you wait

Lucy Sante For Vanity Fair, Lucy Sante writes about her transition: “The beautiful image I sometimes see in the mirror is immediately undone if I try to take a picture. But I am much happier than I can remember being, more centered, many many times more social. A few years before my transition, I had undertaken to sell my papers to the New York Public Library and realized, dimly, that I was preparing for death. Now I want to put off the final curtain for as long as possible.”  The National Book Critics Circle announced the finalists for its

Monica Samayoa Artist Richard Kraft has started a podcast, Acts Facts, that features conversations with artists, writers, scientists, and more about the books that have shaped them. Guests include Albert Mobilio, Marjorie Perloff, Lisa Pearson, and others.   The Millions has posted its list of the most-anticipated books of the first half of 2022 and writers to watch for spring 2022.  For their monthly “Covering Climate Now” column, Columbia Journalism Review talks with Monica Samayoa, a climate reporter and a member of the Uproot Project’s steering committee. Uproot is a network for journalists of color who cover the environment, which

André Leon Talley. Photo: Ballantine Books André Leon Talley, the legendary fashion editor and stylist, has died at the age of seventy-three. He worked at Interview under Andy Warhol, as the chief of the Women’s Wear Daily’s Paris bureau, and was the creative director and editor at large of Anna Wintour’s Vogue. In a 1994 New Yorker profile, Hilton Als wrote: “Talley’s fascination stems, in part, from his being the only one. In the media or the arts, the only one is usually male, always somewhat ‘colored,’ and almost always gay.” His memoir, The Chiffon Trenches, was published in

Lorraine Hansberry. Photo: Wikipedia The New York Magazine Union has reached an agreement with management after more than two years of negotiation. At The Nation, Sam Huber interviews Nobel-winning poet Louise Glück about her new book, Winter Recipes for the Collective, her relationship with John Ashbery’s work, and what teaching means to her: “When I started teaching, I started writing again after the first very long period of silence that I’d ever had. And so I associated teaching with the restoration of speech.” The playwright Lorraine Hansberry “achieved literary celebrity but called herself a ‘literary failure,’ was supported in

Etel Adnan. Photo: Simone Fattal For the New York Times, Amanda Hess writes about several recent novels and films—from Claire Vaye Watkins’s I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness to Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter—in which mothers leave their children. “Lately the vanishing mother has provoked a fresh response: respect.” In these narratives, “children are not abandoned outright,” and work outside of the home is sometimes implausibly regarded as “the ultimate escape.” Hess concludes: “Even as these stories work to uncover motherhood’s complex emotional truths, they indulge their own little fiction: that a mother only becomes interesting when she

McKenzie Wark The New York magazine union reached a deal with management yesterday after two and a half years of negotiations. Olivia Nuzzi, New York’s Washington correspondent, is developing a satirical drama for TV. Deadline reports that the series will follow “a young reporter in DC who defects from the mainstream media” and star Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh. For the New Yorker, Casey Cep writes about Tema Stauffer’s photo series “Southern Fiction.” Stauffer’s subjects include William Faulkner’s kitchen, the street where Richard Wright grew up, and Eudora Welty’s library. But as Cep writes, “Stauffer’s pictures are not illustrations

Tope Folarin. Photo: Justin Gellerson The 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellows have been named. This year, the grantees are all prose writers, including Melissa Febos, Tope Folarin, Kelli Jo Ford, Shruti Swamy, Grace Talusan, and more. At Vulture, Andrea Long Chu reviews Hanya Yanagihara’s new novel To Paradise. Chu argues that Yanagihara remains at heart a travel writer, and that “her work betrays a touristic kind of love for gay men. By exaggerating their vulnerability to humiliation and physical attack, she justifies a maternal posture of excessive protectiveness. This is not an act of dehumanization