Douglas Stuart. Photo: Grove Atlantic Douglas Stuart, whose debut novel Shuggie Bain won the 2020 Booker Prize, has sold his second novel, Young Mungo, which is about “the dangerous first love of two young Glaswegian men.” The book will be published in April 2022 by Picador in the UK and by Grove Press in the US. The National Book Critics Circle hosted a conversation last week on racial consciousness in literary criticism with panelists David Mura, Lisa Teasley, and Myriam Gurba. A recording of the event is now up on YouTube. Molly Young profiles Katie Kitamura, author of the

Anthony Veasna So. Photo: Chris Sackes.  Andrew LaVallee talks with friends and family of the late fiction writer Anthony Veasna So about the bittersweet release of his debut story collection; Afterparties “is now poised for the kind of buzzy release rare for debut collections.” Mark Krotov, publisher of n+1 and an early champion of So’s, said of his writing: “That combination of formal adventurousness and this feel for the texture and the sounds and the smells of day-to-day life—I find that quite rare.” While So’s incomplete novel will not be published as planned, Ecco will publish a book including

Adam Serwer Tonight at 7pm Eastern time, Atlantic writer Adam Serwer will discuss his new book The Cruelty Is the Point: Essays on Trump’s America with How to Be an Antiracist author Ibram X. Kendi. You can register to attend the virtual event here. Ben Cohen writes for the DC publication The Banter that Matt Tabbi—author of The Great Derangement and other books—has thrown “his considerable reputation down the toilet and joined the outer regions of far left/right conspiracy land.” Cohen laments the political contortions of Taibbi’s recent writing, particuarly in a piece on Fox News’s Tucker Carlson: “Taibbi

Jordan Pavlin. Photo: Karen Haberberg. Jordan Pavlin has been named the new editor in chief of Knopf, filling the spot left vacant since her predecessor, Sonny Mehta, died in 2019. Palavin has edited writers including Nathan Englander, Yaa Gyasi, Megha Majumdar, Ayana Mathis, Jenny Offill, Tommy Orange, Julie Orringer, Julie Otsuka, and Karen Russell. In a statement, Knopf publisher Reagan Arthur writes: “Jordan’s reading palate is broad, and her enthusiasm for fine storytelling infectious. She is always willing to go the distance for every writer on our list.” This fall, Patricia Highsmith’s diaries will be published for the first

Jenny Erpenbeck. Photo: Katharina Behling. At n+1 online, writers including Gregg Bordowitz, H. A. Sedgwick, Lauren Michele Jackson, Andrea Long Chu, and more remember Lauren Berlant, the pioneering author and theorist who died on June 28th. In her essay, Long Chu shares an email that Berlant sent her at the beginning of the pandemic: “Just checking in to see how you’re faring. How are you? I hope all of what’s intense is good, and all of what’s ordinary has lots of pleasures in it.” At the New Yorker, Lauren Oyler profiles the celebrated German writer Jenny Erpenbeck: “The selection

Sunjeev Sahota Plans for the Frankfurt Book Fair are moving forward, with many international publishers committing to participating at the in-person conference, which will take place October 20 through 24. Author, scholar, and activist Cornel West has posted his “candid letter of resignation” to Harvard University, which he says has succumbed to “intellectual and spiritual bankruptcy of deep depths.” West, a member of the faculty of the Harvard Divinity School, was recently denied tenure. “We all knew the mendacious reasons given had nothing to do with academic standards,” West writes of the university’s decision regarding his tenure. “I knew

Parul Sehgal Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon, is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year. Powell’s, said to be the world’s largest independent bookstore, is curating a selection of fifty books to mark the occasion. On the store’s website, booksellers write that the list comes out of the past year of lockdown, which they compare to a “diabolic Chuck E. Cheese ticket blaster”: “It’s been a natural time to appraise how we got to this point of fracture and fragility, and how we heal; we want to know who we’ve been, and who we’re becoming, and for that we’ve always

Katie Kitamura (photo: Martha Reta) As D.C. museums begin to reopen, the Washington Post Podcast talks with poet-editor-essayist Kevin Young, the new director of the National African American Museum of History and Culture (and the author of the forthcoming poetry collection Stones). In an interview at the New Yorker, political philsopher and author Jan-Werner Muller (What Is Populism?), who “offers a new way of looking at Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsolaro, and other right-wing leaders.” “Any of us can criticize the decisions of voters and, with regard to some of the leaders you just mentioned, there’s obviously plenty

Sally Rooney At the New Yorker, Sally Rooney discusses a new story, “Unread Messages,” published in this week’s issue. The author tells David Wallace about her fondness for the middle part of a story, before things need to be wrapped up: “In my non-working life, I play a little bit of chess (very poorly), and the phase of play that I like best is the middle game, after the formal opening is out of the way, when the idea of the game starts to clarify. As a novelist, I think I aim to sustain that middle-game feeling throughout the

Amy Sohn. Photo: Craig LaCourt. At Slate, Alexis Nowicki writes about confirming the suspicion that Kristen Roupenian’s viral short story, “Cat Person,” was based on details from Nowicki’s life. The author had never met Roupenian but discovered that an older man she’d dated did and told Roupenian about the relationship. When Nowicki asked Roupenian to comment, Roupenian said that the man had told her a “handful of facts” about dating a younger woman that she then fictionalized, and apologized for not changing the identifiable details. Still, Nowicki feels unsettled: “What’s difficult about having your relationship rewritten and memorialized in

Jessica Hopper At The Cut, Molly Fischer considers the factors that helped inspire a new literary genre: the email newsletter. The pandemic has been particularly hard on the careers of writers, who already had been facing increasing economic hardships before the events of 2020. Steve Borchert looks at how a twenty-first-century Federal Writers’ Project, inspired by the New Deal’s arts initiatives, would work: “Instead of hiring impoverished writers directly—as the Depression-era F.W.P. did—the new program would empower the Department of Labor to disburse $60 million in grants to an array of recipients, from academic institutions to nonprofit literary organizations,

Nikole Hannah-Jones. Photo: Alice Vergueiro/Abraji. Howard University has announced that Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ta-Nehisi Coates will be joining the faculty. Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist behind “The 1619 Project,” will hold inaugural Knight Chair in Race and Journalism. She has declined tenure at the University of North Carolina after a controversy in which she was initially denied by the board of trustees. In a statement about her decision, Hannah-Jones professed her love for the university as a whole but said, “I cannot imagine working at and advancing a school named for a man who lobbied against me, who used

Dana Spiotta. Photo: Jessica Marx. On Wednesday, July 6th, Dana Spiotta will talk about her new novel, Wayward, with George Saunders at the Center for Fiction. The event is free and will be held on Zoom. At the New Yorker, Sam Lipsyte discusses his latest story for the magazine, which is about a man crafting an apology to co-workers. Lipsyte has long been drawn to workplaces in his fiction. As he explains, “Since so many readers know what it’s like to have a job, you can make more daring swerves and leaps with the details and emotional patterns and

Joy Williams. Photo: Anne Dalton  Joy Williams has won the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, a lifetime achievement award. Carla Hayden, the librarian of Congress, said of Williams: “Her work reveals the strange and unsettling grace just beneath the surface of our lives.” Williams’s first novel in more than twenty years, Harrow, will be published this fall. Sarah Schulman’s Let The Record Show, a monumental political history of the AIDS activist group ACT UP, is being adapted as a television series by director Andrew Haigh. Schulman told Deadline, “After covering AIDS since the early 1980s I am

Danielle Dutton. Photo: Washington University in St. Louis Dorothy, A Publishing Project, the independent press run by Danielle Dutton and Martin Riker, is entering into a sales and distribution partnership with New York Review Books. Starting in February 2022, Dorothy books will be listed in the New York Review Books catalog. Due to the new arrangement, Dorothy’s two 2021 titles—Caren Beilin’s Revenge of the Scapegoat and Christina Rivera Garza’s New Selected Stories—will now be published in April, rather than October. Two more titles will be released in Fall 2022, after which point Dorothy will continue to bring out two

Lauren Berlant. Photo: Robert Kozloff. Theorist and author Lauren Berlant has died at age sixty-three. Berlant was a pioneering scholar in heteronormativity, queer theory, and affect theory, whose 2011 book, Cruel Optimism, was a visionary and influential study of how capitalism and neoliberalism shape human desire. Berlant defined “cruel optimism” as “a double-bind in which your attachment to an object sustains you in life at the same time as that object is actually a threat to your flourishing.” They were the author or coauthor of several more books, including The Female Complaint, Desire/Love, and 2019’s The Hundreds, among other

Rachel Cusk. Photo: Sean Dellorco The Man Who Lived Underground, the long-unpublished novel by Richard Wright that was recently issued by the Library of America, is being adapted for the screen. “Like the Soviet state dangling the promise of a radiant future in front of its tired citizens, Musk’s success is sustained by predictions of a technological sublime that’s only ever another decade away.” Phil Jones on Elon Musk at the LRB Blog. At the Creative Independent, the legendary Gordon Lish talks about the best qualities of an editor (“Listen hardest”), Raymond Carver, and whether “there is anything more

Clint Smith. Photo: Carletta Girma For T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Nicole Rudick considers the numerous visual artists who have drawn inspiration from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. “Invisibility may seem antithetical to visual art,” Rudick writes. “How can an artist render what isn’t there? But plenty of artists have embraced this conceptual challenge.” Gordon Parks, who worked with Ellison in 1952 to interpret the then-new novel into an image series for Life magazine, was the first in this line of artists, which includes Ming Smith, Kerry James Marshall, Hank Willis Thomas, Jack Whitten, Cladia Rawles, and others.

Charles Johnson. Photo: Lynette Huffman Johnson. BuzzFeed news is merging with 890 Fifth Avenue Partners so that it can be traded publicly. The internet media company is aiming for a valuation of $1.5 billion and plans to acquire other digital publications, beginning with Complex Network. At LitHub, an excerpt from a new comics collection, It’s Life as I See It: Black Cartoonists in Chicago 1940–1980. In one of the book’s introductory essays, Charles Johnson writes about his early days as an artist and why he still loves comics: “As a writer, I think visually, and no creative pleasure is

Brandon Taylor. Photo: Bill Adams The Asian American Writers’ Workshop is holding a flash sale for tickets to their Page Turner Publishing Conference. Today only, admission is half-price. The conference will be held this Saturday, opening with a keynote address by Matthew Salesses, and will feature panels with Hua Hsu, Jennifer L. Wilson, E. Tammy Kim, Anuk Arudpragasam, Jay Caspian Kang, and others on cultural criticism, the “new editorial vanguard,” the worlds of academic and trade publishing, and more. Parul Sehgal considers several recent books that call to expand and complicate notions of consent, including, among others, Katherine Angel’s