Naomi Klein For Harper’s Magazine, Tobi Haslett looks at the work of Annie Ernaux. Haslett writes, “Ernaux’s works aren’t coy or glancing; they’ve been sharpened to a point. Though she seems like a writer of details, each book is a vital mission, carried out with thrusting force.” For more on Ernaux, see Jamie Hood’s review of The Young Man in the new Bookforum.  Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, and more novelists are filing a lawsuit alongside the Authors Guild against OpenAI. The suit contends that training the AI chatbot on their work “without a word of permission from or a

Nicolas Cage as Miller in Butcher’s Crossing. Credit: Saban Films The trailer for Gabe Polsky’s film adaptation of John Williams’ 1960 western Butcher’s Crossing has been released. Nicolas Cage tells Entertainment Weekly that his performance as buffalo hunter Miller was inspired in part by watching Michael Jordan on the court.  Frequent Bookforum contributor Charlotte Shane has started a Substack, Meant for You. In the first entry, she writes about binge-reading romance novels in an attempt to get more acquainted with bestsellers: “The underlying desires are so clear, the yearning so intelligible: to be worshipped and thirsted after by the hottest

Poet Monica Youn is on the long list for the National Book Award (photo: Sarah Shatz) The National Book Award has now released the longlists for its annual awards in nonfiction, poetry, and translated literature. The finalists in all categories will be announced on October 3. St. Martin’s Press is planning to publish a memoir by Christina Blasey Ford, the psychology professor who, in 2018, testified that Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a party in the 1980s.  Tonight at the PowerHouse Arena in Brooklyn, author Sean Howe will celebrate the release of his new bookAgents of Chaos, which

Namwali Serpell. Photo: © Jordan Kines Photography. Atlantic Books has acquired Namwali Serpell’s next two books: On Morrison, a book-length engagement with the Nobel Prize–winning author, and I Am Dead, a collection of twenty essays. Serpell posted in response to the news, “Delighted about this! There’s no other mind I’d rather spend time with than Toni Morrison’s.” In 2022, Sarah Jaffe talked with Serpell about her novel The Furrows for Bookforum.  The National Book Foundation has revoked Drew Barrymore’s invitation to host this year’s National Book Awards. The foundation cited Barrymore’s decision to resume production of her talk show:

Annie Ernaux Annie Ernaux’s latest novel, The Young Man, was published in English translation today. Ernaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize, was profiled in May by Rachel Cusk in the New York Times Magazine. You can read an excerpt of the novel in Vogue and a review by Jamie Hood in the new issue of Bookforum.  The legendary independent bookstore City Lights is celebrating its seventieth birthday this year. The San Francisco store will host a full slate of poetry readings, book talks, and online panels and discussions.    Kaitlin Phillips shares three books she’s read recently. Considering Elfriede

Merve Emre The Oslo-based online literary magazine Vinduet has published Merve Emre’s lecture on the function of criticism. Emre says, “To narrate the authority of criticism in all its richness and variety requires starting from the inside of this arrangement, from the critic’s mind, and working our way outward, to the contexts in which criticism circulates.” Her lecture does just that, ranging from the 1655 collection The World’s Olio, through considerations of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, and more.  Paul Yamazaki, a bookseller who has worked at City Lights for more than fifty years, will receive the

Elif Batuman. Photo: Valentyn Kuzan In a review of The Fraud for Vulture, Andrea Long Chu considers Zadie Smith’s trajectory as a novelist, arguing that since her debut in 2000 with White Teeth—which James Wood famously described as “hysterical realism”—Smith’s work has become increasingly moral and conventionally realist. Referencing Smith’s 2008 essay “Two Paths for the Novel,” Chu writes: “Her two paths for the novel have become a perfect circle: What could be more avant-garde in an age of data harvesting and identity politics than a heartfelt 19th-century novel?”  “Did ChatGPT seriously just recommend I ‘delve into Proust’s monumental

Rachel Monroe. Photo: Emma Rogers At the New Yorker, Rachel Monroe, the author of Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime and Obsession, reports on how rising population and rising temperatures are causing the state’s legendary swimming holes to dry up.  At The Nation, Suchitra Vijayan, a barrister at law and the author of Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of Modern India, reports on India’s crackdown on Kashmir’s free press, exhibited most recently in the blocking of the website and social-media pages of the Kashmir Walla, an independent news outlet based in Srinagar. The Queen Sofia Spanish Institute

Chelsea Hodson. Photo: Amelia Gray. On the Slow Stories podcast, Chelsea Hodson talks about her writing and editing process and her new imprint, Rose Books, which just published Geoff Rickly’s debut novel Someone Who Isn’t Me. The episode begins with Rickly reading his work.  Track Changes: A Handbook for Art Criticism has just been published by Paper Monument. The book, edited by Mira Dayal and Josephine Heston, collects essays by twenty-five editors and writers on the craft of critical writing. You can read excerpts on n+1 and LitHub and purchase the book from the n+1 store.      In the

Zadie Smith. Photo: © Ben Bailey-Smith Bookforum is thrilled to share our Summer 2023 issue, the first published with the support of our new partner, The Nation. Online now, read Sarah Nicole Prickett on Jacqueline Rose and mourning, Moira Donegan on Judith Herman’s study of trauma, Christian Lorentzen on Don DeLillo’s Cold War novels, Jane Hu on Emma Cline’s The Guest, Harmony Holiday on Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes, and so much more.  For Harper’s magazine, Adam Kirsch reviews Zadie Smith’s latest novel The Fraud, considering it in context of the work of other Gen X writers, including Sheila Heti,

Michelle Tea (Photo: Jenn Rosenstein) On the New York Review of Books website, Willa Glickman interviews writer and philosopher FT. FT, aka Fuck Theory, is an anonymous author who publishes essays on his Patreon as well as writes for the NYR online, 4Columns, and Bookforum, among other publications. FT told Glickman: “I think I’m in an extremely fortunate and indeed somewhat archaic position for an intellectual without independent wealth, and I’m very grateful for it. I’m often broke but my mind lives a positively decadent lifestyle.” Author Michelle Tea is launching her own press, Dopamine Books. “We want to

Yunte Huang. Photo: Sherry-Shi. The New York Times’s Casey Schwartz profiles author Yunte Huang, and talks with him about Daughter of the Dragon, his new book on the Chinese American film star Anna May Wong.  At Vulture, Isle McElroy, Maris Kreizman, Emma Alpern, and Jasmine Vojdani recommend some of the forthcoming books they’re looking forward to reading this fall, including new fiction from Teju Cole, Ed Park, Lexi Freiman, and more.  Writer Grace Byron talks to Study Hall about her recent essay at The Cut, “The False Gospel of Conversion Therapy.” Byron tells Daniel Spielberger, “ Story-telling is not

Anna Biller in Viva For the New York Review of Books, Namwali Serpell reflects on her visit this spring to Princeton’s exhibit on Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, who died in 2019. “An exhibit of archival materials is about as close to putting an author in a museum as you can get,” Serpell writes. “It sits somewhere between, say, a tour of the writer’s home—which feels akin to celebrity worship—and an exploration of the writer’s words, which feels like the scholar’s remit. . . . The question that hovers over all literary tourism of this kind is: Who is this

At n+1, Russian journalist Elena Kostyuchenko writes about why she left Ukraine, how she discovered that she has been poisoned, and how she continues to suffer from the poisoning. “I want to live. That’s why I’m writing this,” she says. “I also want my colleagues and friends, activists, and political refugees currently living abroad to be careful. More careful than I have been. We are not safe and we will not be safe until there is regime change in Russia. The work we do helps to bring this regime down, and it is defending itself.” Kostyuchenko’s book I Love

Jacqueline Rose. Photo: Jonathan Ring This week’s must-read essay is Parul Sehgal’s profile of critic Jacqueline Rose. Rose’s new book of collected essays, The Plague: Living Death in Our Times, was just published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sehgal writes, “Lacan said that analysis did not take place in the present tense but in the future perfect—a way of looking back at what one will have become—and it is here that Rose seemed to dwell during our time together. ‘You’ll want to tease this out,’ she would note, of a particular detail. Or, ‘There’s a whole other story there,

Maya Binyam. Photo: Tonje Thilesen At the Paris Review, Jaqueline Feldman looks into how Parisian bookshops are preparing for next summer’s Olympics. “With a diving suit and helmet,” said one bookseller, “and with dark glasses, earplugs, and a plan for survival and retreat to the countryside. I hate sport. That’s personal, but I hate sport.”  For The Nation, J. Howard Rosier interviews Adam Shatz about his recent book Writers and Missionaries, which collects essays on Kamel Daoud, Edward Said, Michel Houellebecq, Roland Barthes, and Richard Wright, among others. In their conversation, Shatz compares his subjects to musicians: “They’re trying

­Edvard Munch, Todeskuss (The Kiss of Death), 1899, lithograph, 173⁄4 x 241⁄2″. Bookforum’s summer issue is being shipped to subscribers and hitting newsstands soon! This marks our first issue produced in conjunction with our new publishing partner, The Nation, a venerable magazine committed to fiercely independent journalism. Our mission is to continue the conversation where we left off, delivering essays by writers who are deeply engaged with books and contemporary culture. When the magazine was shuttered late last year, we weren’t sure we’d ever be able to make this magazine again, and the essays in our summer 2023 issue,

J. M. Coetzee The CEO of Penguin Random House, Markus Dohle, is stepping down. PRH has been in the news lately as the company had a proposed merger with Simon Schuster blocked by a federal judge.   At the New Yorker’s Page Turner blog, Colin Marshall looks at J. M. Coetzee’s decision to publish his new novel in Spanish before it’s made available in English, and considers the author’s contention that the Spanish translation is closer to his true intentions for the book. As Marshall reports, Coetzee said at a literary festival, “I do not like the way in which

Margo Jefferson. Photo: Claire Holt A work stoppage on Thursday from members of the New York Times Guild is likely. Last week, over 1,000 union members pledged to walk out on the job if management does not agree to a fair contract by December 8.  The new issue of the Yale Review features work by Windham-Campbell Prize winners, including Margo Jefferson, who contributed an essay on “questioning my writing self more pointedly.” In particular, Jefferson scrutinizes her “need for elective affinities” and to rebel against “a writer who helped make you possible.”  Issue 44 of n+1 magazine is online

Memory by Bernadette Mayer. Courtesy of Siglio Press Author and filmmaker Astra Taylor gives a short talk on student loans and how we can rethink debt.  The Feminist Press is currently accepting submissions. Michael Schaffer writes about why no one wants books on the Biden Administration, and why the publishing industry considers them “bookstore poison.” The poet and artist Bernadette Mayer—the author of Midwinter Day (an exploration of “the richness of life and time as they happen to us in tiny explosions,” per John Ashbery), Memory, and other books—has died at seventy-seven.  The Monthly of Australia has published a new