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 The FBI has arrested Filippo Bernardini, a staffer at Simon Schuster UK who stands accused of stealing unpublished book manuscripts.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

This week, the editors of Artforum and Bookforum remember Joan Didion, the peerless American novelist and essayist. Her canonical work was capped in 2011 by the memoir Blue Nights, which Gary Indiana considered for Bookforum alongside Susan Jacoby’s Never Say Die: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age. His essay is an uncompromising polemic about aging and death—and why we shouldn’t look away.

Joan Didion. Photo: Julian Wasser. Joan Didion has died at age eighty-seven. For Bookforum, Sarah Nichole Prickett reviewed Didion’s South and West in 2017, and Gary Indiana wrote about Blue Nights in 2011. For the New York Times’s 2021 edition of “The Lives They Lived,” Jane Hu remembers the pioneering author and scholar Lauren Berlant, who died in June. Hu writes that Berlant was always “careful not to moralize. Instead, their work was organized around an abiding generosity and curiosity about the shameful inconsistencies driving people’s interior worlds.” In the London Review of Books, Patricia Lockwood reviews Karl Ove

Mark Prins. Photo: Nina Cochran For The Point, Apoorva Tadepalli looks at the writing life in a personal essay that also discusses recent criticism in n+1 and Bookforum as well as fiction by Sally Rooney, Christine Smallwood, Lauren Oyler, and more. Reflecting on the idea that resisting “love what you do” rhetoric is politically useful but personally unsatisfying, Tadepalli observes, “There is a contradiction . . . of both scorning a system that’s shallow and rigged, and also feeling bitter about not being able to succeed within such a system.” For more on literary careerism, see Bookforum’s panel “Don’t

Louis Lomax In n+1, Elias Rodriques considers the life and work of journalist Louis Lomax on the occasion of Thomas Aiello’s new biography, published by Duke University Press. Rodriques writes of the reporter: “Lomax may have fallen out of historical memory, but, as a one-man embodiment of the Civil Rights Movement’s ideological diversity, he was integral to ensuring that the movement did not.” Historian Julius S. Scott has died at the age of sixty-six. Scott was known for a groundbreaking work on the Hatian Revolution, which started as a dissertation that finally found a publisher in 2018, after three

Eve Babitz Eve Babitz—the author of the cult classics Eve’s Hollywood and Slow Days, Fast Company—has died at age seventy-eight. As Kaitlin Phillips wrote in Bookforum: “Babitz’s strength in analyzing LA is that she never quite saw herself as one of the beautiful people. . . . She wasn’t born starry, and when you’ve had to make yourself that way, you understand how much art is involved: You don’t underestimate glamour or charm. It didn’t always come easy to Babitz, but she knew better than to make it look hard, so she learned to write the way she spoke.

Alexandra Kleeman. Photo: Fred Tangerman The Vice Media Union and the Writers Guild of America, East have agreed on a new contract, consilidating four previous contacts with the guild under one deal. The new agreement guarantees a minimum salary of $63,000 by 2024 and minimum annual raises of 3 percent. As the Hollywood Reporter writes, the contract also “offers a ‘retention bonus’ of $1,000 . . . eradicates NDAs regarding sexual harassment complaints; institutes anti-harassment and cybersecurity measures for employees . . . and offers certain employees flagged by the company’s security team safe housing or other security protections.”

Barack Obama. Photo: Pete Souza. Barack Obama has released his list of the best books he read in 2021. The former president’s picks include Lauren Groff’s Matrix, Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads, Clint Smith’s How the World is Passed, Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle, and more. At The Cut, a roundup of writers remembering bell hooks on Twitter; at the New Yorker, Hua Hsu considers hooks’s legacy; at Essence, a list of some of her greatest books. The Brooklyn Rail selects the best art books of 2021. In the Washington Post, Stephen J. Adler and Bruce D. Brown write about a New

bell hooks. Photo: Pluto Press Poet, scholar, and activist bell hooks has died at the age of sixty-nine. She is the author of more than forty books, including All About Love: New Visions, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity, and poetry collections And There We Wept and Appalachian Elegy. Since 2004, she lived in Kentucky, her home state, where she taught at Berea College and founded the bell hooks Institute, which houses her personal collection of African American art. New York’s Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at the New

Tammie Teclemariam. The Wirecutter Union has reached a deal for a new contract with the New York Times. Last month, the union went on strike on Black Friday and the following weekend. Staff writer Kaitlyn Wells commented, “The collective strength of our unit is incredible. Despite the roadblocks of the pandemic and the Time’s continuous union-busting tactics, we didn’t give an inch in the vision of making Wirecutter the best place to work.” Tyler Stovall, the author of White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea, has died at age sixty-seven. In an interview earlier this year for The