Anne Rice Anne Rice, the author of the gothic best-seller Interview with the Vampire and more than thirty other novels, has died. Chris Cuomo is being investigated for his attempts to help his brother, former governor Andew Cuomo, circumvent charges of sexual misconduct. After being fired by CNN, Chris Cuomo was dropped by his publisher HarperCollins. Deep Denial is, according to the publisher, a “provocative analysis of the harsh truths that the pandemic and Trump years have exposed about America—about our strength and our character—and a road map of the work needed to make our ideals match reality.” The

Shirley Hazzard. Photo: Nancy Crampton/Macmillan  In Molly G. Yarn’s new book, Shakespeare’s “Lady Editors,” the scholar recovers the lives of more than sixty women who have edited the Bard. Yarn recently told The Guardian, “These things matter because the editor shapes and presents the text to readers—editing isn’t a neutral task.” Melissa Anderson reviews Paul Verhoeven’s latest film, Benedetta, which is about the Renaissance-era lesbian prophetess Sister Benedetta Carlini “whose life epitomizes the Dutch provocateur’s most abiding theme—sex and power.” You can read more about Benedetta in Moira Donegan’s contribution to Bookforum’s “Heaven and Hell” issue from summer 2020.

Abdulrazak Gurnah. Photo: © Mark Pringle. Abdulrazak Gurnah, the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature, has given his Nobel lecture. The Tanzanian-born novelist stressed that “writing cannot be just about battling and polemics, however invigorating and comforting that can be.” Jon Caramanica considers the work of the late critic and musician Greg Tate, calling him “ a singular voice, a fount of bravura essays on the fantastical creativity, determined resilience and wry paradoxes of Black creativity and life. His writing froze and shattered time, supercharged neurons, unraveled familiar knots and tied up beautiful new ones.” The Wirecutter

Greg Tate. Photo: Nisha Sondhe/Duke University Press Greg Tate, the guitarist, cultural critic, and author of Flyboy in the Buttermilk, has died at age sixty-four. A longtime writer for the Village Voice, Tate wrote about everything from Basquiat to Eminem, and went on to cofound the Black Rock Coalition. He was first introduced to criticism by reading Amiri Baraka’s Black Music, and in his own work was known for what Hua Hsu has called his “slangy erudition.” Readers and friends remember Tate on social media, and a line he wrote in 1991: “I realized that the meaning of being

Jacqueline Rose. Photo: Mia Rose For Vulture, Kira Josefsson writes about works in translation and why big publishers have been reluctant to include the translator’s name on book covers. “It’s possible that publishers believe readers will be scared off if they know that a book is a translation. . . . It raises the question of whom we are translating for and why we read.” The Sycamore Review is asking readers for support as its host university, Purdue, is considering closing the magazine. In The Guardian, Jacqueline Rose writes about how the pandemic has changed the way we think

Myisha Cherry National Book Award winner Tiya Miles, the author of All That She Carried, has sold her new book Harriet’s Mirror to Random House. According to the publisher, the book is “a dual literary biography of Harriet Jacobs, the author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” In the wake of Alice Sebold’s statement that she wrongly identified Anthony Broadwater as the man who raped her in 1988, Laura Miller revisits the author’s book Lucky. “As I reread this memoir now, the narrator of Lucky transforms from

Jamaica Kincaid. Photo: Sofie Sigrinn. Jamaica Kincaid is this year’s recipient of the Hadada Prize from the Paris Review. The journal’s publisher Mona Simpson said: “I can’t think of another writer whose voice contains such intensities of rage and love.” The lifetime achievement award will be given at the Paris Review’s Spring Revel, which will take place in person in April. In a new episode of On the Nose, the Jewish Currents podcast, Ari Brostoff hosts a discussion between Kay Gabriel and Vicky Osterweil about Let the Record Show, Sarah Schulman’s newest book. Osterweil wrote a review for Jewish

Anand Gopal Smithsonian magazine has announced its picks for the best history books of 2021. The winners include Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America by Keisha N. Blain, The Man Who Hated Women: Sex, Censorship, and Civil Liberties in the Gilded Age by Amy Sohn, and America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s by Elizabeth Hinton. Jenna Johnson has been named the new editor in chief of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The New Yorker has named Anand Gopal and Clare Malone as staff writers and Graciela

Bryan Washington. Photo © Dailey Hubbard Alice Sebold has apologized to Anthony J. Broadwater, the man wrongfully convicted of the rape she describes in her memoir Lucky. Broadwater, who was exonerated last week, told the New York Times, “To make that statement, it’s a strong thing for her to do, understanding that she was a victim and I was a victim too.” For the New Yorker, Bryan Washington tours some of the nation’s gay bars to see how they’ve been affected by the pandemic: “The crowd grew gradually. The mood felt familial. Groups of twos and threes merged and

Garth Greenwell. Photo: Bill Adams The New York Times has announced its ten best books of 2021. At LitHub, seven writers talk about their day jobs. Working construction, teaching high school, bartending, and being a pharmacist are among the professions represented. Social worker Rosalie Knecht explains the parallels between the two professions: “A lot about the way we understand our own lives comes from our sense of narrative and how we organize information, and for someone who is already interested in those questions and enjoys conversation, it’s a great job.” Light Industry’s Thomas Beard has announced that he’s starting

Donika Kelly Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa, both reporters for the Washington Post, have sold their biography of George Floyd to Viking. The book, My Name Is George Floyd, is set for publication in May 2022. Twitter cofounder and CEO Jack Dorsey has resigned and the company’s former CTO, Parag Agrawal, will be taking over. Dorsey wrote to the staff: “I’m really sad . . . yet really happy. There aren’t many companies that get to this level.” Referring to his own decision to leave, he continued, “And there aren’t many founders that choose their company over their own

Lydia Davis. Photo: © Theo Cote Anthony J. Broadwater, who was convicted of the 1981 rape described in Alice Sebold’s memoir Lucky, has been exonerated. Timothy Mucciante, the executive producer of a planned film adaptation of Sebold’s book, played a role in bringing attention to Broadwater’s case: “I started having some doubts, not about the story that Alice told about her assault, which was tragic, but the second part of her book about the trial, which didn’t hang together.” For Thrillist, Esther Zuckerman talks with director Paul Thomas Anderson about his new movie Licorice Pizza, the San Fernando Valley’s

Sally Rooney, 2017. The Wirecutter Union is striking from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday and is asking for readers and shoppers to support a boycott of the website during that time. The strike plan comes after two years of bargaining with the New York Times Company, and, according to the union, amid continued “unfair labor practices and wage offers that significantly underpay our staff.” The union hopes to reach a deal with management by Black Friday. More than seventy writers, artists, critics, and other luminaries have signed a letter supporting Sally Rooney’s decision to not publish the Hebrew translation of

Merve Emre. Photo © Christian Nakarado Dave Hickey—legendary magazine writer and author of the essay collection Air Guitar—has died. As Christopher Knight at the Los Angeles Times notes in his appreciation, Air Guitar “is easily the most widely read book of art criticism to appear in our time.” You can read Hickey’s Bookforum column on Colson Whitehead and poker here. At Public Books, Merve Emre talks about annotating Mrs. Dalloway: “My goal was not to confront the reader with a boring, scholarly series of footnotes pointing him or her to places and dates. Instead, I wanted to help to

Lincoln Michel Today is the last day to submit books to Lambda Literary’s “Lammy” Awards. You can find submission guidelines here. At his Substack, Lincoln Michel weighs in on the latest iteration of the MFA debate: “MFAs become a stand-in for whatever trend in literature someone dislikes. I’ve seen MFAs blamed for hysterical realism, dirty realism, McSweeney’s style fabulism, autofiction, ‘identity novels,’ and everything else in-between. (Sometimes it’s claimed that whatever style is being denounced was actually a deep state CIA plot all along.)” While MFAs can be useful for individual writers, Michel argues that they “just aren’t that

Sylvère Lotringer. Photo: Iris Klein. The National Book Awards have been announced: Jason Mott has won in Fiction for Hell of a Book; Tiya Miles in Nonfiction for All That She Carried; and Martín Espada in Poetry for Floaters. The Paris Review’s editor Emily Stokes has announced that the magazine is getting a redesign, inspired by the Review’s book-size editions of the past. The new look will debut with the Winter 2021 issue, out in December. In the Chicago Tribune, John Warner offers an appreciation of Fiona McCrae, the Graywolf Press publisher who is retiring next year. Warner observes,

Patrick Radden Keefe. Photo: Lars van der Brink New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe has won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction for his book on the Sacklers, Empire of Pain. Essayist and novelist Sloane Crosley tells Entertainment Weekly about her forthcoming book, “a romantic comedy set in a new age mind control cult on the Lower East Side” called Cult Classic: “My hope is that what sets it apart from every other romantic comedy set in a new age mind control cult on the Lower East Side is that it’s also a mystery.” Zoe Hu reviews Jay

Sarah Schulman. Photo: Drew Stevens. The ACT UP Oral History Project has a new website, with nearly two-hundred video interviews with members of the AIDS activist group as well as an archive of material from The Latina/o Caucus of ACT UP New York. For more, check out Bookforum’s interview with the oral history’s co-founder Sarah Schulman and Moira Donegan’s review of Schulman’s book Let the Record Show A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993. Join us on Thursday for “No Wrong Answers: Authors in Conversation.” This free online event will feature Elias Rodriques and Robin D. G.

Edward P. Jones Novelist, journalist, and artist Etel Adnan has died at age ninety-six. Her 1978 novel Sitt Marie Rose is a classic of war fiction, and Adnan was also a prolific poet—here, you can see the author reading from her epic book-length poem, The Arab Apocalypse (1980), at the Serpentine Galleries in 2011. In the early 2010s, her reputation as a painter began to grow, culminating in this year’s exhibition of six decades of art at the Guggenheim museum. Writing about Adnan’s show at Mass MoCA in 2019, Kaelen Wilson-Goldie—author of a 2018 monograph on the artist—notes the

Brandon Taylor. Photo: William J. Adams Bryan Washington, Lauren Groff, Percival Everett, Dana Spiotta, Brandon Taylor, Joshua Cohen, and others have been long-listed for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. A new conspiracy theory is taking root on Reddit, where some are arguing that novelist Thomas Pynchon is ghost-tweeting for director Paul Thomas Anderson under the pseudonym Sam Harpoon. Spotify is getting into the audiobook business. At the Paris Review, Alex Abramovich interviews music critic and poet Joshua Clover about his new book on Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers’ song “Roadrunner”: “I didn’t choose ‘Roadrunner’ because its recording timeline