Gish Jen. Photo: © Basso Cannarsa. On the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast, co-hosted by Whitney Terrell and V. V. Ganeshananthan, writers Gish Jen and Peter Ho Davies talk about violence targeting Asian Americans, representation in pop culture and literature, and potential ways to move forward. Remembering the genesis of her 1991 novel Typical American, Jen talks about the pushback she had to overcome: “Not only did I write a novel, I wrote a novel that claimed full Americanness for Asian Americans. The first line is: ‘It’s an American story.’ I cannot tell you how much flak I got for that. ‘What

Nico Walker. Photo: Penguin Random House/courtesy of the author At Jacobin, author and former bank robber Nico Walker talks with Alex Press about his time as a medic in Iraq, his novel Cherry, and what he read while in prison: “The selection at Youngstown jail was not great; it was a lot of Louis L’Amour books and thrillers, which I didn’t really enjoy. But I chanced into a copy of The Idiot and saw how he balances a farce and a tragedy at the same time, and does these amazingly well-executed scenes where someone is showing their ass. The

Jo Livingstone In their acceptance speech for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, Jo Livingstone writes about the value of criticism in accursed times: “The upside to living, or at least writing, in a constant state of ‘emergency’ is that we begin to feel that the time for talking may be running out, and so we start to say what we mean a little more.” At Vulture, Christian Lorentzen remembers Giancarlo DiTrapano: “He had hustle, and he had integrity. He followed his very rigorous tastes and never compromised. It would never occur to

Rachel Kushner. Photo: Lucy Raven/New Directions Giancarlo DiTrapano, the mastermind behind the New York Tyrant literary magazine and Tyrant Books, passed away last week at age forty-seven. A singular, generous, adventurous, and beloved editor, he published work by Gary Lutz, Megan Boyle, Atticus Lish, and many others. For The Guardian, novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of the The Sympathizer and The Committed, has written an essay on the history of violence against Asian Americans in real life and popular culture. “The systemic violence of a US foreign policy designed to kill Asians in large numbers, or threaten to kill

Rita Bullwinkel The New Republic Union has announced that after discussions between management and Guild members, “no employee currently working in New York City will be asked to relocate and no one will lose their jobs relating to the company’s decision to increase its footprint in D.C.” Rita Bullwinkel, author of the short story collection Belly Up, has created a “sound library” called Oral Florist, which collects recordings of artists and writers reading everyday texts out loud: Christine Schutt reads from The New England Cookbook; Deb Olin Unferth reads two certificates affixed to her refrigerator; Vi Khi Nao reads

Hanif Abdurraqib. Photo: Megan Leigh Barnard For Literary Hub, Elisa Sotgiu outlines why some scholars believe that Elena Ferrante is the pseudonym of Domenico Starnone, a novelist from Naples who is married to translator Anita Raja (who is also a subject of speculation by readers and scholars.) At The Guardian, Moira Donegan writes about reporter Felicia Sonmez’s since-overturned suspension from the Washington Post after sharing an article on Twitter about the sexual assault allegations against Kobe Bryant on the day of the basketball player’s death. On Sunday, Politico reported that Sonmez has long been prohibited from covering stories of

John Lewis, 1964. Photo: Marion S. Trikosko/Library of Congress. John Lewis’s last graphic novel, Run, will be published posthumously in August. The book follows Lewis’s bestselling series, “March,” which ended the story with the author’s historic march from Selma when he was twenty-five. Lewis, who died in July, said of the new book, “In sharing my story, it is my hope that a new generation will be inspired by Run to actively participate in the democratic process and help build a more perfect Union here in America.” At The Verge, Jane Hu writes about anti-Asian violence and the police-surveillance

Wayne Koestenbaum. Photo: Ebru Yildiz. The workers at Duke University Press are forming a union. In a series of tweets, the DUP Workers Union outlined some of the reasons why they’re organizing: “We all want to see DUP continue to be successful. . . . However, working conditions have been a problem for years now. We’ve seen constant turnover, extended vacancies, disruptive reorganizations, patterns of discrimination, inconsistent enforcement of policies, low compensation.” The union has released their mission statement here. The American Academy of Arts and Letters has posted its 2021 Literature Award winners. News Corp and HarperCollins have

Richard Wright. Photo: Gordon Parks/Library of Congress At the London Review of Books, Benjamin Kunkel files a dispatch from Boulder, after the shootings. “In A Room with a View, E.M. Forster complains of ‘the ghoulish fashion in which respectable people will nibble after blood.’ The era of gun massacres in the US has coincided with the rise of social media, and the respectable way to nibble after blood is now to use the dead as ideological counters in posts on Facebook and Twitter. It isn’t enough to reiterate the plain truth that the assault weapons used in mass shootings

Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood. Photo: Rutgers University Workers from two dozen publishers including 7 Stories Press, Archipelago Books, and Haymarket, along with employees at multiple bookstores and literary agencies, have declared solidarity today with Amazon workers organizing a union drive in Bessemer, Alabama. “We in the book industry talk a lot about Amazon as a troublesome but insurmountable inconvenience while decrying its adverse effects on independent publishing and bookselling,” said Daley Farr, a publicist at Coffee House Press. “But to truly transform our work and our industry in the ways we say we want to, we have to confront

Danielle Belton. Photo: D. Finney Photography The New Republic is returning to Washington, DC. The New York Times also reports that Michael Tomasky, editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas will take over as the new editor. Chris Lehmann will stay on as editor at large. At New York magazine’s Intelligencer, Eric Levitz writes about the latest round of Substack discourse, as the newsletter platform was recently in the news again because of its Substack Pro platform. The company was criticized for offering pay guarantees to high-profile writers (some of whom have written anti-trans rhetoric), which, Levitz observes, some

Diane Wilson. Photo: Sarah Whiting At NiemanLab, Natasha Ishak looks at how mainstream media’s coverage of the Atlanta-area shootings ultimately “cast doubt on racist intent behind the mass shootings—despite the facts that the businesses attacked were Asian-owned, the majority of victims were of Asian descent, and the shootings took place amid an uptick in anti-Asian hate crimes across the country.” Mainstream outlets were quick to publish stories about the gunman, including an interview with his grandmother, instead of quoting eyewitnesses and locals as some Korean outlets did. Ruth DeFoster, who researches how American media reports on mass shootings and

Emily Stokes. Photo: Taryn Simon. The Paris Review has named Emily Stokes as its new editor. Stokes has previously been an editor of the New Yorker, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, and the Financial Times. She is taking over for Emily Nemens, who resigned recently to work on her fiction. Stokes said in a statement on the magazine’s website: “After a year in which we have been alone and driven mad by the news, the Review’s mandate, to publish ‘the good writers and good poets, the non-drumbeaters and the non-axe-grinders,’ is a timely calling.” In

Ijeoma Oluo. Photo: Basic Books Denise Oswald, currently the executive editor at Ecco, has been hired to be the new editorial director at Pantheon Books. Haruki Murakami fan Masamaro Fujiki has made a playlist of every song the author has written about in his fiction and on his website. The list currently features 3,500 songs. The New York Times is looking to hire a new Sunday Review Editor. According to the job posting: “You need to be creative and ambidextrous, with strong editorial judgment and an obsession for Times standards. You will work with Opinion’s editors and writers, as

Kazuo Ishiguro. Photo: Andrew Testa Alexi McCammond will not be assuming the role of editor in chief of Teen Vogue, after anti-Asian tweets she wrote in 2011 resurfaced. In a statement posted yesterday, McCammond wrote that the tweets “have overshadowed the work I’ve done to highlight the people and issues that I care about—issues that Teen Vogue has worked tirelessly to share with the world—and so Condé Nast and I have decided to part ways.” In the latest episode of “Artists On Writers | Writers On Artists,” presented by Artforum and Bookforum, painter Laura Owens talks to Édouard Louis.

Connie Mae Oliver. Photo: Marc Basch This afternoon, the Brooklyn Rail hosts an event, “A People’s History of the Pandemic in NYC,” featuring poet Connie Mae Oliver, Meral Agish and Lori Wallach of the Queens Memory Project, and Denise Milstein and Ryan Hagen from the NYC COVID-19 Oral History, Narrative, and Memory Archive. At The Atlantic, Morgan Ome talks with Cathy Park Hong about her book Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, anti-Asian racism in America, and coalition building: “The rhetoric has changed from We want more Asians in Hollywood. It’s not just about representational politics. It’s also about

Pola Oloixarac. Photo: Denise Giovanelli Leo Robson reviews Sarah Moss’s new novel, Summerwater, for the New Yorker. The novel is something of a study of Brexit Britain, and follows characters in postindustrial northern towns. But, Robson notes, “the novel is powered not by the local tensions it depicts but by the existential conflict underpinning them. When we write about the behavior of a society, Moss seems to say, we are also talking about the workings of the individual mind; collective myths—nostalgia for a pre-industrial past and an unmixed populace, the dream of a sovereign future, some settled story about

Cathy Park Hong For Gen, Alexander Chee talks with Cathy Park Hong about her book Minor Feelings, racial triangulation, and anti-Asian discrimination. Hong sees her book as a “very subjective portrait of an artist as an Asian American,” and reflects: “I also think that there were a lot of thorny subjects that I just touched upon, and that was just the tip of the iceberg. And I think I’ll probably delve deeper into that. What form it’s going to take, I don’t know. Americans are not really ready to look at race; they can only look at race in

Thulani Davis. Photo: University of Wisconsin-Madison Daphne A. Brooks, the author of Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound, looks at the Grammy award for best liner notes, and at the three women who have won since its inception in 1964: playwright, essayist, and poet Thulani Davis, who won in 1993 for her essay accompanying Aretha Franklin’s Queen of Soul—the Atlantic Recordings; Lynell George (A Handful of Earth, a Handful of Sky) who won in 2018 for her liner notes to Live at the Whisky A Go Go: The Complete Recordings, Performed by Otis

Leslie Jamison. Photo: Beowulf Sheehan After bargaining for almost two years, the Gimlet Union has reached a deal with Gimlet Media. “Nostalgia is a sneaky curator,” writes Leslie Jamison at the New York Times, in an essay about the fantasy of “the Before Times.” For Jamison, Svetlana Boym’s distinction between reflective and restorative nostalgia is useful: “While restorative nostalgia wants to recreate an idealized past, reflective nostalgia interrogates the very image it longs for. Restorative nostalgia is drawn to monuments; reflective nostalgia to ruins.” Jamison’s essay is part of a series, “The Week Our Reality Broke,” about a year