• Sylvère Lotringer. Photo: Iris Klein
    November 11, 2021

    Sylvère Lotringer. Photo: Iris Klein Sylvère Lotringer, the French literary critic, theorist, and founder of the journal that grew into Semiotext(e) Press, has died at age eighty-three. Lotringer published English translations of works by the giants of French philosophy, among them Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, and Jean-François Lyotard. On Twitter, Lotringer’s mentees, readers, and students offer remembrances. Artforum’s announcement of his passing leaves us with a quote: “Though the texts he published were frequently tortuous, Lotringer abided by a simple overarching principle. ‘Never give people what they want,’ he said, ‘or they’ll hate you for it.’”

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  • Ashley D. Farmer. Photo: Kelly Davidson
    November 10, 2021

    Ashley D. Farmer. Photo: Kelly Davidson The Whiting Foundation has announced the recipients of its Creative Nonfiction Grant. Among the awardees, all of whom will receive $40,000 while working on their books, are Lorelei Lee, Ashley D. Farmer, Sangamithra Iyer, and Rebecca Clarren. The New Republic’s Alex Shephard writes about the University of Austin, Bari Weiss’s proposed anti-woke college: “In general, it has more in common with Masterclass, the fake online ‘school’ where you can pay a few hundred dollars to have Carlos Santana teach you how to noodle an electric guitar into submission, than with any actual university.”

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  • Fiona McCrae. Photo: Erin Smith Photography 
    November 9, 2021

    Fiona McCrae. Photo: Erin Smith Photography  Fiona McCrae, the director and publisher of Graywolf Press, has announced her plan to retire this June. McCrae led the Minneapolis press for twenty-seven years, and published books by Eula Biss, Jamel Brinkley, Leslie Jamison, Percival Everett, Layli Long Soldier, Tracy K. Smith, and more. McCrae said of her tenure, “It’s been a marvelous adventure and I am so grateful to all the incredible individuals I have had the pleasure of working with, from the exceptional staff and board to all our cherished and talented writers.” For the New York Times Magazine, Andrea

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  • Vanessa Nakate. Photo: Paul Wamala Ssegujja.
    November 8, 2021

    Vanessa Nakate. Photo: Paul Wamala Ssegujja. Claire Denis, the French director of Beau Travail, is currently filming her adaptation of Denis Johnson’s thriller The Stars at Noon. In the vein of Robert Stone and Graham Greene, Stars, one of Johnson’s early novels, follows an English businessman and an American woman, who fall in love in a politically volatile Nicaragua. Margaret Qualley and Joe Alwyn will play the leads. Lithub has run an excerpt from Vanessa Nakate’s A Bigger Picture: My Fight to Bring a New African Voice to the Climate Crisis, in which she describes her involvement with the

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  • Lucie Elven. Photo: Sophie Davidson
    November 5, 2021

    Lucie Elven. Photo: Sophie Davidson The New York Mag Union has an illustrated Twitter thread with stories from New York magazine staff who have left the magazine. Tupelo Press has announced that it will publish four manuscripts out of more than one thousand that had been submitted during the press’s open reading period this summer. J. Mae Barizo, Preeti Kaur Rajpal, Mike Lala, and Kate Partridge will each receive a $1,000 advance and will be published, promoted, and distributed by Tupelo. For 4Columns, Lauren Michele Jackson reviews the film adaptation of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing, “a story of

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  • Damon Galgut. Photo: Marthinus Basson/Europa Editions
    November 4, 2021

    Damon Galgut. Photo: Marthinus Basson/Europa Editions Damon Galgut has won the 2021 Booker Prize for The Promise, published in the US by Europa Editions. The novel is the story of an Afrikaner family told over the course of three decades. Galgut had previously been shortlisted for the Book twice and is the third South African author to win the award. You can watch Galgut read from the book here. Deep Vellum Publishing is relaunching Dalkey Archive Press in Spring 2022. The company will reissue classic Dalkey titles and publish new fiction. For The Nation, Lindsay Zoladz reviews a recent

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  • Elissa Washuta. Photo: KR Forbes
    November 3, 2021

    Elissa Washuta. Photo: KR Forbes The Department of Justice has sued Penguin Random House in a move to block the publisher from acquiring Simon Schuster. The DOJ’s focus on how the merger would impact the advances authors receive rather than potential effects for consumers “signals a significant shift,” the New York Times reports, in lawmaker attitudes toward corporate consolidation. The civil suit outlines how the proposed merger “would likely result in substantial harm to authors of anticipated top-selling books and ultimately, consumers.” Elissa Washuta, author of White Magic, has shared her “in-progress, reverse-chronological list of books by Native and

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  • Robin D. G. Kelley 
    November 2, 2021

    Robin D. G. Kelley  The new episode of Bookforum’s video series “No Wrong Answers” will debut live on November 18th with novelist Elias Rodriques and scholar-author Robin D. G. Kelley. n+1 magazine’s Bookmatch 2021 fundraiser is now live. If you make a donation during November, you’ll get a personalized reading list from n+1 contributors and associates, including Andrea Long Chu, Molly Young, Christian Lorentzen, Tony Tulathimutte, and more. The independent media organization Grist is looking for an Indigenous Affairs Fellow. The paid, full-time position offers mentorship as well as the opportunity to report on how climate change affects Indigenous

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  • Abdulrazak Gurnah (photo: Mark Pringle)
    November 1, 2021

    Abdulrazak Gurnah (photo: Mark Pringle) The gubernatorial race in Virginia, to be decided on Tuesday, is neck-and-neck. In the final weeks of his campaign, Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin has been criticizing his opponent, Terry McAuliffe, for vetoing (twice) legislation that would require all public-school teachers in the state to tell parents of any reading material with “sexually explicit content.” (The bill has been nicknamed “The Beloved Bill,” after the Toni Morrison novel.) McAuliffe’s response has been to the point: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” In the latest installment of his consistently annoying

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  • Joy Williams. Photo: Anne Dalton
    October 29, 2021

    Joy Williams. Photo: Anne Dalton Joy Williams has won the 2021 Kirkus Prize in Fiction for Harrow, her first novel in twenty years. Brian Broome has been awarded the nonfiction prize for his memoir Punch Me Up to the Gods. New hires have been announced at the New Yorker: Julian Lucas and Emma Green have been named staff writers, Merve Emre will be a contributing writer, Susan Orlean will be writing an obituary column (“You can expect Susan to put her own spin on it, paying homage to people known and unknown, plus animals, trees, and even inanimate objects.”),

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  • Maggie Nelson. Photo: Harry Dodge.
    October 28, 2021

    Maggie Nelson. Photo: Harry Dodge. At The Nation, Mark McGurl talks about his new book, Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon. McGurl explains how he decided to “use Amazon to reframe our view of the contemporary literary world from as low a vantage point as possible on the prestige hierarchy. From that vantage, a lot of new things become visible—wonderfully lurid and disturbing things!” Vox Media has announced multiple promotions across the company. Among the changes are Meredith Haggerty becoming the senior editor of culture, Shirin Ghaffary being promoted to senior correspondent, and Caroline Houck

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  • Andrea Long Chu. Photo: Juliet Kleber
    October 27, 2021

    Andrea Long Chu. Photo: Juliet Kleber Bookforum contributor Andrea Long Chu is joining New York magazine as a book critic, starting on November 15. “Each of her subjects is a portal into something broader,” said New York editor in chief David Haskell, “and each of her reviews you end up mulling hours after you put them down.” For The Baffler, Jack Hanson writes about Ghosts, Edith Wharton’s 1937 collection of “tales of the uncanny,” newly reissued by New York Review Books: “Wharton was in all aspects of her work and life preoccupied by the domestic . . . while

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  • Charlie Warzel
    October 26, 2021

    Charlie Warzel In his Galaxy Brain newsletter, tech reporter Charlie Warzel wonders what happens now that the Facebook Papers—a vast trove of documents released by an internal source—have been made public. Warzel writes that the leak proves many of the damning things reporters have been saying about Facebook for years, and yet the next steps are still uncertain: “I don’t know what comes next but I’m concerned. I’m concerned that Facebook is too big. I’m concerned that people might tuning out due to over-saturation. I’m concerned that the ‘fixes’ that could come from this momentum are going to be

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  • Sarah M. Broom. Photo: Hal Williamson
    October 25, 2021

    Sarah M. Broom. Photo: Hal Williamson Hogarth Books has bought three books by Sarah M. Broom, whose 2019 debut, The Yellow House, won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and the NBCC John Leonard Prize for Best First Book. The publisher says that the three books, which will be connected thematically, dwell on “what it means to be a Black woman wanderer, mount an architectural survey of teeth and the infrastructure of the body, and finally, in returning home, will explore New Orleans through its history of Black homeownership.” Maud Newton’s book Ancestor Trouble, which was sold to Random

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  • Elizabeth Hardwick
    October 22, 2021

    Elizabeth Hardwick For the Los Angeles Review of Books, Zachary Fine considers a forthcoming biography of Elizabeth Hardwick, her reputation as a stylist, and her popularity today. Cathy Curtis’s A Splendid Intelligence is one of a spate of books by or about Hardwick published in recent years; it seems, Fine writes, we are in “the prolonged season of Hardwick.” Fine also points out that some critics working today seem to write like her: “What better way to sneer at mass-market fiction and the flat Globish prose of ‘world literature,’ say, than to insist on writing like Hardwick: stunningly, unsaleably,

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  • Summer Brennan
    October 21, 2021

    Summer Brennan At Gawker, writer and former Believer intern Nicholas Russelll reflects on the magazine’s nearly twenty-year history and questions the official narrative about why the publication is closing: “While the official record supplied by BMI and UNLV paints a picture of an unfortunate, but ultimately pragmatic decision to ‘focus on its core mission,’ the reality is less noble. Callous mismanagement and a lack of care overshadowed the good work being done at the magazine.” The closure comes a few months after Joshua Wolf Shenk, the editor in chief of The Believer, resigned after exposing himself during a Zoom

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  • Henry Louis Gates Jr. Photo: Stephanie Berger
    October 20, 2021

    Henry Louis Gates Jr. Photo: Stephanie Berger The College of Liberal Arts at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas has decided to cut its funding of The Believer magazine, which is operated through the college’s Black Mountain Institute. The bimonthly literary magazine was started in 2003 by Ed Park, Heidi Julavits, and Vendela Vida, and was published by McSweeney’s until 2014. The February/March 2022 issue will be the last published with the Black Mountain Institute. On Twitter, writers and readers are sharing some of their favorite pieces from the magazine’s archive: Dustin Illingworth recommends Christopher Beha on John Hawkes;

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  •  Asali Solomon. Photo: Ron Nichols; Mural: David Shane.
    October 19, 2021

    Asali Solomon. Photo: Ron Nichols; Mural: David Shane. In the New York Times, Molly Young reviews Asali Solomon’s new novel, The Days of Afrekete. The book, inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Toni Morrison’s Sula, and Audre Lorde’s Zami, is coming out today. Young writes, “Solomon’s novel is a feat of engineering. It’s also a reverie, a riff on ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ and a love story.” To which we’d add: It’s also quite funny. Earlier this fall, Solomon told Porochista Khakpour in a Bookforum interview: “Humor is really important to me. And I think that in that sense, the greater

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  • Joshua Clover
    October 18, 2021

    Joshua Clover Duke University Press has started its new “Singles” series, in which authors devote an entire book to a single song. Duke UP elaborates: “Not just a lone track on an album, but a single: a song distributed to and heard by millions that creates a shared moment it is bound to outlive, revealing social fault lines in the process.” The first book in the series, by poet and critic Joshua Clover, is devoted to Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers’ 1972 song “Roadrunner.” The book not only offers a deeply felt homage to the song but also

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  • Kevin Young. Photo: Melanie Dunea
    October 15, 2021

    Kevin Young. Photo: Melanie Dunea For Study Hall, Alex Sujong Laughlin reflects on a decade of work as a ghostwriter, a social media manager, and a podcast producer. Working behind the scenes made her realize the myth of individual genius: “To recognize that a ghostwriter, or producer, or a professional of one of a dozen other careers that don’t get performed in the spotlight, has irreplaceable skill and experience would demean the singular and incomparable gift of the person at center stage.” Andrew Key considers The Distance Cure, Hannah Zeavin’s new book on teletherapy, for The Point. Against the

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