Elias Rodriques. Photo: Jourdan Christopher At n+1, you can read an excerpt from Elias Rodriques’s debut novel, All the Water I’ve Seen Is Running, which is out today from W. W. Norton. On Thursday evening, Rodriques will discuss his novel with author and Pennsylvania State Senator Nikil Saval in a virtual event at the Free Library of Philadelphia. For more on the novel, see this Times review. Succession actor Nicholas Braun has been cast in the film adaptation of Kristen Roupenian’s 2017 viral short-story, “Cat Person.” Braun will play the older man, Robert, who sleeps with Margot, a twenty-year-old

Kwame Anthony Appiah. Photo: Wikipedia/David Shankbone At The Cut, Mia Mercado writes about Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s recent three-part essay “It Is Obscene,” in which the Americanah author responds to accusations that she is transphobic. In the essay’s second part, Adichie describes a particular author’s “perverse self-absorption” and “utter lack of self-awareness.” As Mercado points out, this author is Nigerian novelist Akwaeke Emezi, who in 2020 called Adichie transphobic in a Twitter thread. Emezi has written in a statement posted on Instagram: “I won’t be reading [Adichie’s essay] because it wasn’t meant for me. It was designed to incite hordes

Jesse McCarthy. Photo: Nina Sparling After more than two years of negotiation, the New Yorker Union has secured a new agreement, averting a strike. According to the union’s Twitter account, the agreement includes provisions on compensation, job security, benefits, diversity and inclusion, and workplace safety. Bloomberg reports that New Yorker fact-checkers have won employee status rather than being hired as subcontractors. Earlier this week, Ben Smith reported on the New Yorker’s union drive for the New York Times, and offered a look inside meetings held by the magazine’s marquee writers, some of whom were hesitant to join NewsGuild. Tonight

Annette Gordon-Reed. Photo: W. W. Norton/Tony Rinaldo Linda Amster, a research supervisor at the New York Times, put in long hours on the Pentagon Papers story, but did not receive credit. Now, in a new oral history and audio interview, she’s getting recognition—sort of. Though she’s been allowed to narrate her role, the paper will not amend the original piece, as Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha explains: “We’re setting the record straight with readers with the new reporting and podcast. It’s more effective than appending an update or correction on a decades old story.” Remembering the original snub, Amster

Marlon James. Photo: Mark Seliger. The Los Angeles Times talks with Marlon James about season two of the podcast Marlon Jake Read Dead People, which James co-hosts with Riverhead editor Jake Morrissey. The show is a lively forum for discussions of books from the past—hence the title—and James and Morrissey are not afraid to mix it up, as James observes: “Our conversations are always very discursive. Jake would drop an allusion, and I would say, ‘That writer’s a jackass!’” Tomorrow is the Royal Society of Literature’s Dalloway Day 2021, a celebration of Virginia Woolf’s novel held every year on

Saidiya Hartman. Photo: John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation The 2021 Pulitzer Prizes have been announced. The New York Times’ Wesley Morris won for criticism, Louise Erdrich for the novel The Night Watchmen, Marcia Chatelain for the historical work Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, Les Payne and Tamara Payne for the biography The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X, and Natalie Diaz for the poetry collection Postcolonial Love Poem. Scribner’s Nan Graham has purchased the memoir Both/And: A Life in Many Worlds by longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin. According to the publisher, the

Elizabeth Schambelan. Photo: The Rona Jaffe Foundation Elizabeth Schambelan writes about the January 6 Capitol breach in an essay for Triple Canopy. She discusses the Three Percenters, nation-states and fraternity, “the far-right’s Sparta fetish,” and the difficulty of making sense of it all: “Apparently, I’m overreading, overthinking, but how could I not? The American right has undergone an occult turn, communicating in esoteric code, hand gestures, arcane glyphs, abbreviations as forbiddingly cryptic as the tetragrammaton. A hermeneutics that pushes interpretation only as far as parsimony allows seems unlikely to penetrate the rococo bramble of right-wing semiotics. What if to

Kate Zambreno. Photo: © Heather Stern. Alex Press and Jacobin magazine have a new podcast, Primed, about Amazon. The show will cover the online retailer’s operations, working conditions, and its effects on society, the environment, culture, politics, and more. For more on Amazon’s role in furthering inequality, see Press’s review of Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillis in the Spring issue of Bookforum. This afternoon at 3pm EDT, McNally Jackson bookstore will host Kate Zambreno to discuss her new book To Write As If Already Dead, with Bhanu Kapil. The book circles Zambreno’s attempts to

Tsitsi Dangarembga. Photo: Hannah Mentz Tsitsi Dangarembga, author of This Mournable Body and Nervous Conditions, has been awarded the PEN Pinter Prize, which celebrates authors of a significant body of work which examines the world with, in Harold Pinter’s words, an “unflinching, unswerving” gaze and “fierce intellectual determination.” Previous winners include Tom Stoppard, Salman Rushdie, and Chmamanda Ngozi Adichie. Michelle Zauner’s novel Crying in H Mart is being adapted for film. Zauner, who also makes music using the name Japanese Breakfast, will contribute a soundtrack. Leo Robson writes about the late theorist J. Hillis Miller’s contributions to literary deconstruction

Larissa Pham. Photo: Adalena Kavanagh The New Yorker Union is preparing to strike, after more than two years of bargaining. On their website, union members explain why they are ready to strike, and how readers, subscribers, and freelancers can hold the picket line if the union does strike. ProPublica has begun publishing a new series based on the tax records of billionaires. The first installment shows how wealthy Americans like Warren Buffet, Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, and Elon Musk avoid paying taxes. ProPublica writes that in the coming months it will take an in-depth look at how high earners

Kiese Laymon A number of star reporters at the New York Times have joined forces to try to prevent the NewsGuild of New York from raising the paper’s union dues. NewsGuild says that without dues increases, it will face financial disaster, and will no longer be able to offer the legal and staffing services it has provided in the past. Buzzfeed reports that a “contingent of more than 100 New York Times staffers signed a letter to the union opposing its proposals for raising cash. That petition, which has been shared widely in media circles, included the signatures of

Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker has died at the age of ninety-six. Writing for the Poetry Foundation last year, Ryan Ruby gave an insightful overview of Mayröcker’s life and work. Born in Vienna in 1924, Mayröcker has written well over one hundred books, with only a small fraction of those available in English translation. Earlier this year, the Paris Review published an excerpt from The Communicating Vessels, published by Public Space Books. At the New York Times, Alexandra Alter and Jennifer Schuessler report on what will become of Philip Roth’s private archive. In the weeks since Blake Bailey, Roth’s sole

David Diop According to Politico, editorial employees of The Atlantic are unionizing with the NewsGuild of New York. The union wants to institute a compensation floor of $60,000, healthcare, a flexible time-off policy, and twenty weeks of paid parental leave. McKay Coppins reports on the difficulty conservative book publishers are having with Joe Biden as president, writing that the market for anti-Biden books is “ice cold.” David Diop’s novel At Night All Blood Is Black, translated by Anna Moschovakis, has won the International Booker Prize. For more on Diop, see this profile from May. CNN Business reports on the

Pamela Sneed. Photo: Patricia Silva The winners of the 2021 Lambda Literary Awards were announced last night. Among the awardees are Jenn Shapland in the Lesbian Memoir/Biography catagory for My Autobiography of Carson McCullors, Pamela Sneed in Lesbian Poetry for Funeral Diva, and Zeyn Joukhadar in Transgender Fiction for The Thirty Names of Night. In addition, special honors were given to Sarah Gerard, Brontez Purnell, T Kira Madden, and others. At the London Review of Books, Joanne O’Leary writes about Mabel Loomis Todd and her daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham. Mabel Loomis Todd had an affair with Emily Dickinson’s brother

Join us tonight at 7pm EDT to celebrate the release of our new issue. For “Truth or Dare: On Authenticity, Risk, and the Future of Fiction,” Lauren Oyler, Ed Park, Omari Weekes, and Jo Livingstone will discuss risks writers should take now, books that demonstrate innovative approaches to authenticity, comedy, irony, sincerity, and more. The event is free; please RSVP here. At LitHub, Rachel Kushner talks to Franciso Goldman about his new novel, Monkey Boy. For the New Yorker, Victor Luckerson writes about Mary E. Jones Parrish and Eddie Faye Gates, two Black women authors who told the story

Kevin Young. Photo: Melanie Dunea New York Times critic Jennifer Szalai reviews Scott Ellsworth’s The Ground Breaking, a new history of the Tulsa Massacre. The massacre took place in 1921, when white mobs killed the Black inhabitants of an entire block in the city’s Greenwood district and demolished their homes. Ellsworth details how the story has been covered up and suppressed; “Where the history of the massacre wasn’t obscured, [Ellsworth] found it distorted, deformed by conspiracy theories or attempts to both-sides it,” Szalai writes. Poet and director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture Kevin

Rosa Brooks Eric Carle, the picture-book author with more than seventy titles to his name, has died at the age of ninety-one. According to the New York Times, Carle sold more than 170 million copies of his books. In a 1995 interview, he talked about how he turns small ideas into full-fledged works: “You think about it, you forget about it, you obsess about it. I get depressed a lot, and that seems to precipitate things. My wife sees my mood darken and says, ‘Uh-oh, you’re ready to do a book.’” In the same article, Carle observes how he

Roxane Gay Roxane Gay is starting an imprint with Grove Atlantic. Roxane Gay Books will publish three books per year, focusing on underrepresented voices. Gay told the Times that she will be accepting submissions this summer from writers with or without agents: “There are so many barriers and so many gates. Let’s take them down.” Grove is also starting a paid one-year fellowship program, a “crash course” in publishing open to applicants outside traditional publishing circles. Faculty leaders from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are urging their board of trustees to vote on Nikole Hannah-Jones’s tenure

Zakiya Dalila Harris. Photo: © Nicole Mondestin Photography. The New York Times profiles Zakiya Dalila Harris, the author of The Other Black Girl, based in part on Harris’s experiences working in publishing. The book, which is also being developed as a TV series for Hulu, started a bidding war with fourteen publishers vying for the title. Harris says she was inspired by Jordan Peele’s Get Out: “Talking about white liberals in this way seemed so new to me at the time, and I really wanted to do something similar with the book.” This fall, Haymarket Books will publish a

Kerry Howley Kerry Howley—author of Thrown, about the time she spent among mixed martial artists—is joining New York magazine as a features writer. New York has also hired Justin Miller as its new news director and Ryu Spaeth (currently at the New Republic) as a deputy editor. Khadija Abdalla Bajaber’s The House of Rust, which won the first Graywolf Africa Prize, is scheduled for publication in October. Doubleday has signed a two-book deal with Stacey Abrams. Both of the forthcoming books are political thrillers featuring the character Avery Keene, the hero of Abrams’s best-seller While Justice Sleeps (also Doubleday).