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

Benjamin Moser Alyson Sinclair is taking over as the owner and publisher of The Rumpus, the online literary magazine founded in 2009. The 2022 Black Comic Book Festival will take place this week beginning on Thursday, January 13th. This year marks the tenth anniversary of the event, hosted by the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Virtual programs will include discussions of Afrofuturism, Black Anime, and the craft of visual storytelling. An in-person exhibition “Boundless: 10 Years of Seeding Black Comic Futures,” will begin at the center on Friday. In the new episode of

Marcial Gala. Photo: Ricardo Bacallao At Substack, George Saunders has launched Story Club, a master class on writing short fiction. Saunders will look at one story each month (looking at how fiction works and affects readers), offer writing exercises, and lead interactive class features. Students will help shape the curriculum. “I’m really excited about the spontaneous nature of this,” Saunders says, and adds that Story Club is an “attempt at democratizing graduate writing programs.” CUNY is offering a selection of journalism, writing, and video-storytelling classes to the public in January and February. All classes are offered online. For a

Emily Prado The winners of the 2022 Pacific Northwest Book Awards are Jill Louise Busby, Omar El Akkad, Emily Prado, Xiran Jay Zhao, Julie Morstad, and Anthony Doerr. The virtual celebration will be held on February 8 at 9pm Eastern. High Country News has rounded up their readers’ favorite stories from the past year, including a look at how the southern border wall has damaged animal habitats and disrupted migration routes, a profile of the Indigenous team behind the new TV series Reservation Dogs, and a report on the “land back” movement in the Black Hills. Noname Book Club

Jennifer Wilson Bookmarks suggests five reviews you need to read this week, including essays by Patricia Lockwood, Geoff Dyer, Anne Enright, Jennifer Wilson, and Joseph Luzzi. Vulture has gathered book picks for 2022 by more than a dozen critics. FiveThirtyEight has posted a collection of podcasts and articles reflecting on last January’s insurrection at the Capitol. For Vox, Zack Beauchamp talks to experts about where American democracy may be heading. The FBI has arrested Filippo Bernardini, a staffer at Simon Schuster UK who stands accused of stealing unpublished book manuscripts. The Times reports that “The phishing attacks have been

Lincoln Michel The Robert B. Silvers Foundation has announced the winners of the inaugural Silvers-Dudley Prizes for criticism and journalism. Judged by Hari Kunzru, Drenka Willen and Madeline Schwartz, the awardees include Becca Rothfeld, Merve Emre, Vinson Cunningham, Elaine Blair, and more. Dorothy, A Publishing Project has shared the two books they will publish in fall 2022: A Horse at Night: On Writing by Amina Cain, and Some of Them Will Carry Me by Giada Scodellaro. At Boston Review, Robin D. G. Kelley and Bongani Madondo discuss Greg Tate’s life and work, and his writings on jazz in particular.

Ben Smith. BuzzFeed Yesterday Fire and Fury author Michael Wolff reported for the Ankler that Random House has decided not to publish a collection of Norman Mailer’s political writings in 2023. Wolff’s article cited a Random House source who blames a “junior staffer’s objection” to the essay “The White Negro” and the idea that Roxane Gay might also object. (Wolff clarified that Gay “may have been employed as merely a generic type of objector.”)The story lit up Twitter for the day, for better and for worse. In his newsletter, Jeet Heer took stock of the story and the larger

Raven Leilani. Photo: Nina Subin Vogue and Oprah Daily Books have posted their lists of the most-anticipated books of 2022. At the New York Times, Alex Traub has written an obituary for bookseller Ben McFall, the “heart” of the Strand Bookstore. “In phone interviews, three people—Lisa Lucas, the publisher of Pantheon Books; the writer Lucy Sante, a onetime Strand colleague of Mr. McFall’s; and Nancy Bass Wyden, the Strand’s owner—all referred unprompted to the reliability with which, when visiting Mr. McFall, they’d encounter a line of other people hoping to speak to him.” The Guardian has a new interview

Nathaniel Mackey. Photo: Nina Subin. At Hyperallergic, Albert Mobilio and John Yau pick their favorite poetry books of the year. Their choices include work by Nathaniel Mackey, John Keene, Will Alexander, and Kim Min Jeong, as well as an issue of the Chicago Review dedicated to contemporary Korean poetry. For the New Yorker, Hilton Als considers the life and work of Joan Didion, and explains how issues of race, class, and gender play out in her writing: “Raised in a white Republican family in Sacramento, she grew up with the rights and privileges of her class. But, as she

Seyward Darby At The Nation, Jennifer Wilson reviews Maggie Nelson’s new book, On Freedom, in which the poet and critic touts indeterminacy in four essays on sex, art, drugs, and the climate crisis. “For all the space she devotes in the book’s introduction to her worries over the right-wing co-optation of ‘liberation’ (as a political slogan, if not an actual politics), the book’s essays tend to find Nelson chiding the left for what she considers its overcorrections and overreaches,” Wilson writes. For more on the book, read Charlotte Shane’s essay in Bookforum. Alex Shephard, Erin Somers, and Eric Jett

Alexander Chee. Photo: M. Sharkey Alexander Chee, the author of the novel The Queen of the Night and the essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, will be editing the 2022 edition of Best American Essays. Author and biologist E. O. Wilson—who researched and wrote books about insects, human behavior, and biodiversity—has died at ninety-two. Wilson won the Pulitzer prize for nonfiction twice, for his books On Human Nature and The Ants. LitHub has a list of the New York Public Library’s most-borrowed books of 2021. At Crime Reads, Michael Gonzales pays tribute to Chester Himes and his

Parul Sehgal For the New Yorker, Parul Sehgal writes about the trauma plot: “Unlike the marriage plot, the trauma plot does not direct our curiosity toward the future (Will they or won’t they?) but back into the past (What happened to her?).” Twitter is weighing in. For his year-end newsletter, Sasha Frere-Jones has collected seventy-one reflections on the past year with contributions by Lucy Sante, Rachel Kushner, Hannah Black, Merve Emre, Pete L’Official, and more. 4Columns recaps its ten most read reviews of 2021, including Blair McClendon on The Underground Railroad Amazon series, Hermione Hoby on Sally Rooney’s novel