Rumaan Alam For The Nation, Chalay Chalermkraivuth interviews Pop Song author Larissa Pham about desire, survivorship, and the importance of vulnerability to her writing. Pham sees the rise in defensive posturing in criticism and on social media—“a relatively recent phenomenon”—as a sign that stakes are missing from the argument. “Stakes are what make you care about something. They are what allow you to know what people value. So showing my stakes is what I can do to push back against that.” Jewish Currents assistant editor Joshua Leifer is writing a book on “the state of American Jewish identity as

Valeria Luiselli. Photo: Diego Berruecos Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive has won the Dublin Literary Award. The winner is selected from a group of books nominated by libraries around the world. Luiselli’s novel was chosen by a library in Barcelona, and the author said of the institution, “I’m going to kiss its rocks one day, because I probably won’t be able to kiss its librarians because of Covid.” Samir Mansour Bookshop, a bookstore and library in Gaza, was bombed in an Israeli airstrike on Tuesday. n+1 has posted a 2016 diary by Rachel Kushner that she wrote during a

Raven Leilani. Photo: Nina Subin For the Oxford Review of Books, Alex Chasteen pairs Raven Leilani’s Luster and Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby in a review discussing how, taken together, these novels suggest “a sort of unified theory of dissociation, linking together social marginalisation (as understood through transness, Blackness) with sex and violence as ways of coming into or leaving a body you’ve been alienated from.” Viking will publish a final novel by the late spy novelist John le Carré: Silverview will be released in October. “This is the authentic le Carré, telling one more story,” said the writer’s youngest

Stephen Dixon At LitHub, an essay on the late writer Stephen Dixon, who died in 2019. Courtney Zoffness remembers Dixon as a teacher at Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, a caring, authentic presence who students could hear banging away on a manual typewriter. Writing about Dixon’s work—he was extremely prolific, with nearly seven-hundred short stories and thirty-five books—Zoffness observes, “Steve has a distinct, frenetic, unsentimental writing style, one attuned to the humdrum of daily life. His characters are profoundly humane.” The new issue of McSweeney’s has more on Dixon, including four previously unpublished stories and an essay on the

Still from “The Underground Railroad,” © Amazon Studios. Photo: Kyle Kaplan. Molly Jong-Fast—an editor at large at the Daily Beast and cohost of The New Abnormal podcast—has sold her book The Last Good Day to Simon Schuster for a reported six figures. According to the publisher, the book examines how trends in the 1990s set the stage for the political clashes and inequality of the present, illustrates “how technological innovation outpaced our ability to regulate it,” and “how government policies fanned the flames of war and cultural division no one could yet fathom.” Jhumpa Lahiri and Princeton classics professor

Jacqueline Rose. Photo: Mia Rose Muumuu House had published a collection of remembrances of Giancarlo DiTrapano, founder of Tyrant Books and New York Tyrant magazine, who died six weeks ago. Parul Sehgal considers Jacqueline Rose’s new book, On Violence and Violence Against Women, for the New York Times. In essays reflecting on Harvey Weinstein, sexual harassment, Anna Burns’s Milkman, and Trump’s “Global Gag Rule,” Rose examines “how violence first takes root in the mind” and how it perpetrates “a theft of mental freedom.” The new issue of Columbia Journalism Review has been released in a digital edition, “What Is

Kavita Bedford. Photo: © Christopher Woe For the New Yorker, Lauren Michele Jackson considers Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground, newly published in full by the Library of America. Jackson notes that the novel “tickles audiences’ appetite for that which feels both timely and, at the same time, transhistorical.” She continues: “In marketing the book’s theme of police violence, the shepherds of the new Library of America edition may be inadvertently reinforcing an old dynamic between readers and Wright, which is a version of the dynamic that plagues readers and Black writers more broadly—namely, that any interest in

Brandon Taylor. Photo: Bill Adams Brandon Taylor, author of the novel Real Life, writes about fiction, reception, and subjectivity, and the “difference between writing about life as a black writer and writing about black life as a black writer.” Reflecting on how his fiction has changed, and looking back at his own early stories, Taylor writes, “I was substituting white subjectivity for my own particular subjectivity and calling it black subjectivity. I was an object in my own mind.” The goal, for Taylor, is to be read as “one person grappling with the difficulty of trying to express.” Publishers

Samuel R. Delany In “Why I Write,” at the Yale Review, the pioneering author and critic Samuel R. Delany explains his lifelong engagement with the torturous profession. Of his early years, Delany observes, “I wrote because I began to realize (to borrow William Blake’s words from Proverbs of Hell), ‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time.’ It keeps producing them—and it keeps destroying them.” Versha Sharma has been announced as the new editor of Teen Vogue. Sharma was previously the managing editor at NowThis. The hire comes after the previous editor, Alexi McCammond, resigned after an outcry

Toni Morrison. Photo: Timothy Greenfield Sanders. Knopf/Doubleday At n+1, Tobi Haslett has a powerful essay reflecting on and remembering the uprising in response to the murder of George Floyd, an uprising that is already being played down and repurposed in the media and in national politics. “At the DNC last fall we saw how the uprising may be remembered: a sunny, noble blur of soaring rhetoric and ‘peaceful’ crowds—a fabulous alternative to the rawness on the ground. But certain facts remain; some things can’t be wished away. Too much was born and broken amid the smoke and screams. The

Jhumpa Lahiri. Photo: Elena Seibert Eileen Myles considers a new book published by Mack that pairs the photographs of Moyra Davey with those of the late Peter Hujar. Writing about Hujar’s 1978 photo, Wave-Sperlonga, Myles observes: “I look at his oily dark surface, his haptic black sea I don’t think ‘immersive’ like Moyra’s. It’s the Hudson in the seventies. Dirty as fuck.” For Defector, The Believer’s features editor Camille Bromley discusses the LA Times’s flawed framing of a story that downplayed the harm done by former Believer editor in chief Joshua Wolf Shenk when he exposed himself during an

Eddie S. Glaude Jr. Photo: Sameer A. Khan At LitHub, Eddie S. Glaude Jr. writes about James Baldwin’s Nothing Personal, in an afterword to a new stand-alone edition of the 1964 Baldwin essay: “The reader gets a sense of the depth of his despair and his desperate hold on to the power of love in what is, by any measure, a loveless world—especially in a country so obsessed with money.” For more Glaude on Baldwin, read this interview with the author in the Fall 2020 issue of Bookforum. In an open letter sent to The Bookseller, a group of

Joshua Cohen. Photo: Penguin Random House In The Nation’s Spring Books issue, Elias Rodriques reviews Richard Wright’s posthumously published novel, The Man Who Lived Underground. Rodriques also considers the true story of Herbert C. Wright, a man who retreated underground during the Great Depression because he was out of work: “He stole to support himself in an economy and a country that would not support him. The surrealist, fantastical, and gothic elements of both his story and The Man Who Lived Underground serve to underscore how bizarre and unnatural such a governmental structure should seem.” The Guardian has published

Alison Bechdel. Photo: Elena Seibert. The Guardian covers a new UN report that describes the widespread abuse of female journalists online. “The Chilling: Global Trends in Online Violence Against Women Journalists” was a survey of more than nine-hundred reporters in 125 countries. Unesco, the UN agency that commissioned the study, points out that this abuse has systemic implications: “Online violence against women journalists is designed to belittle, humiliate, and shame; induce fear, silence, and retreat; discredit them professionally, undermining accountability, journalism and trust in facts.” The Baffler has excerpted John Keene’s new introduction to Echo Tree, a new collection

Arundhati Roy. Photo: Wikimedia Commons The God of Small Things author Arundhati Roy has written a powerful long essay about India’s “Covid catastrophe” and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attempts to stifle critics of the government. Writing at The Guardian, Roy offers a dire report on what is happening in India now: “”Crematoriums in Delhi have run out of firewood. The forest department has had to give special permission for the felling of city trees. Desperate people are using whatever kindling they can find. Parks and car parks are being turned into cremation grounds.” The essay builds to a sharp

Mensah Demary Soft Skull Press’s editor in chief, Mensah Demary, talks to Catapult about his work at the indie press. Of his plans for the future, he says: “To evolve it into a house of diverse literary artists where each writer feels Soft Skull supports and respects their work. I intend to encourage readers to visit Soft Skull’s backlist and spend some time with it.” The interview is part of Catapult’s Don’t Write Alone vertical, which features resources, advice, and writing opportunities. For Commonweal magazine, Anthony Domestico reviews new poetry collections by Michael Robbins (Walkman) and Hannah Sullivan (Three

Nella Larsen The Paris Review has posted a conversation between Eloghosa Osunde, the winner of the magazine’s 2021 Plimpton Prize, and Akwaeke Emezi, author of, most recently, The Death of Vivek Oji. ProPublica is hiring three journalists for its Abrams Reporting Fellowship. The position is a two-year investigative gig, and pays $75,000 a year, plus benefits. In a call for applicants, ProPublica writes, “Our newsroom zigs where others zag.” The Marshall Project has a roundup of writing by incarcerated people about how they survived the COVID-19 pandemic in prison. Bruce Bryant writes from Sing Sing prison in New York,

Helen Oyeyemi. Photo: Tereza Linhartova Claire Grossman, Stephanie Young, and Juliana Spahr take a digital humanities approach to investigate “Who Gets to be a Writer?” for Public Books. Their analysis—which uses demographic data of the judges and winners of fifty-one literary prizes from 1918 to the present—shows that the most statistically significant factor is where a writer attended college or university. After the year 2000, they observe an uptick in the number of nonwhite, prizewinning authors, but note that literary culture “is also becoming more exclusionary, more tied to elite educational institutions, and more difficult to enter. These obstacles

Danielle Evans. Photo: Beowulf Sheehan. Danielle Evans, author of The Office of Historical Corrections and Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, has won the New Literary Project’s Joyce Carol Oates Prize. Oates said of the author: “She has a wickedly sharp eye and ear for hypocrisy and is very funny about pretentiousness in private life as in public life.” The New York Times has announced that it is retiring the term “Op-Ed,” introducing new design elements meant to help differentiate between opinion journalism and news, and has hired sixteen contributing writers to the Opinion section. Opinion editor Kathleen

Jonny Sun. Photo: Rozette Rago Stacey Abrams discusses her new novel, While Justice Sleeps, and why it took a decade to find a publisher. The book, a thriller about a Supreme Court Justice who learns of a conspiracy involving the President before falling into a coma, will be published by Doubleday on May 11. At Medium, novelist Michael Chabon apologizes for being a Scott Rudin apologist. He writes that he knew that Rudin, with whom he collaborated for more than twenty years, could be abusive. “But I didn’t just know; I took it for granted, from the first. Scott