Tsitsi Dangarembga. Photo: Hannah Mentz PEN International has issued a statement on the conviction of Zimbabwean author and filmmaker Tsitsi Dangarembga, who was arrested without explanation or charge while peacefully protesting with her friend Julie Barnes in 2020, and later arraigned in court for “incitement to public violence” and “breaching of COVID-19 health regulations.” Per PEN’s statement, which was released yesterday: “Tsitsi Dangarembga and Julie Barnes should be celebrated as model citizens, not condemned as criminals following a sham trial on trumped up charges of promoting public violence. We called for and expected their unconditional acquittal today, after more

Cathy Park Hong As part of its “At Home in Asian America” feature package, New York magazine has a profile of Cathy Park Hong by Clio Chang. Hong is a poet and the author of Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. Discussing the wide resonance of that 2020 book, Chang writes, “At the time, there were a handful of prominent Asian American writers but no one who served the function of a catchall spokesperson for the idea of Asian America.”  For the New Yorker, Keith Gessen talked to experts in war-termination theory about possible outcomes in Ukraine.  In the

Celeste Ng. Photo: Kieran Kesner As part of a special editorial package “At Home in Asian America: Who Are We Becoming?” in this week’s issue of New York magazine, Andrea Long Chu writes about Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts and considers what it and other “mixed Asian novels” offer readers. For Chu, these are novels written by people who, like their main characters, “are of both white and East or Southeast Asian ancestry”; these characters tend to share “a gnawing uncertainty” about their race and what it means to them. “Asian America is not an idea for these authors,”

Torrey Peters For Electric Literature’s “What Comes Next” series, in which debut authors talk about their second book, Isle McElroy talks with Torrey Peters. Peters tells McElroy, “When I thought of writing as a craft, I don’t think I knew what writing was for. I thought if you write something beautiful that is enough. Now, I feel that writing is largely about communicating something urgent to certain people.”  Bookforum is hosting a free online event on September 30th. “Sports Annotated,” will feature Lindsay Zoladz, Miranda Popkey, Ross Gay, and Thomas Beller discussing sports and literature. You can get your

Hilton Als Publishers Weekly reports from the Joan Didion memorial service, which took place last week at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Speakers included Didion’s Knopf editor Shelley Wanger; New Yorker editor David Remnick; author and musician Patti Smith; actor Vanessa Redgrave; politician Jerry Brown; poet Kevin Young; and writers Hilton Als, Susanna Moore, Jia Tolentino, and Calvin Trillin. Nic Rowan provides his account of the Didion memorial at The Lamp: “The celebration, after all, was a publishing house’s attempt at making the myth of Didion as the Last All-American Writer.”  This fall, Random House will publish

Hilary Mantel. Photo: Els Zweerink  Hilary Mantel, the British author of seventeen books including Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, and The Mirror and the Light—which comprise her trilogy based on Thomas Cromwell’s life—has died at the age of seventy. In addition to her prize-winning historical fiction, Mantel wrote criticism and essays for the London Review of Books, contributing over fifty pieces since 1987. Today, the Review will unpaywall and share a selection of those writings. At his Substack, Leo Robson reflects on Mantel’s philosophy of historical fiction, her influences, and her friendship and collaboration with the Huntington Library

Orhan Pamuk For The Guardian, Lucy Hughes-Hallett reviews Orhan Pamuk’s latest, Nights of Plague, which takes place during the end of the Ottoman Empire.  Hughes-Hallett observes: “ it is a novel about a community ravaged by an incurable disease. It talks—in many different voices—about enforced isolation and lockdown. It tracks the way an epidemic justifies authoritarian measures, providing another way for Pamuk to make a veiled comment on Turkey’s current regime.”  Imani Perry’s new book, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, is out now. In an essay in The Nation, Robert

Sandra Cisneros. Photo: © Keith Dannemiller Yxta Maya Murray interviews Sandra Cisneros about her new book of poetry, Woman Without Shame, which is out now. After a wide-ranging conversation on poetry, her family, and her many awards, Murray asks Cisneros what her most significant relationship was. The poet mentions her dog, Camacho: “He loved me like no human being has ever loved me. Sometimes the great love of your life has four feet and a tail.”  There is still time to get free tickets to Bookforum’s online event, “Sports Annotated,” a discussion of fandom, obsession, and loss with Miranda

Hua Hsu. Photo: Devlin Claro/New York Institute for the Humanities For Vulture, Ryu Spaeth profiles Hua Hsu and argues that Hsu’s new coming-of-age memoir, Stay True, represents an evolution in Asian-American literature. While the book is largely an elegy to a college friend who was murdered after a party, it also depicts Hsu and his buddies just hanging out, with some highly comedic results: “The book has some very funny scenes of Hsu being embarrassed by his extremely basic friend, rolling up the car window so no one can hear Ken blasting ‘Crash Into Me’ on the stereo.” In

Jung Hae Chae Jung Hae Chae has been awarded the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize for her book Pojangmacha People. The prize, which was created to “honor and encourage the art of literary nonfiction,” has in the past gone to writers such as Kevin Young, Leslie Jamison, Esmé Weijun Wang, and Lars Horn. In addition to giving Chae a $20,000 advance and a $2,000 stipend, Graywolf will publish the book, which, according to the publisher, “deeply explores the idea of matrilineal inheritance of ‘han’ in the Korean diaspora…[and] centers the lives of ‘ordinary’ Korean women…who take action as the makers

Still from The Rings of Power. Photo: Amazon.   The National Book Award has announced its longlist for fiction and nonfiction. The finalists will be announced on October 4th. Eight of the ten nominated works of fiction were debuts.    On September 30th, Bookforum will host a Brooklyn Bookfest event, “Sports Annotated,” based on our summer issue about sports and literature. The panel will feature poet Ross Gay, critic Lindsay Zoladz, and novelist Miranda Popkey in discussion with moderator Thomas Beller. You can get your free tickets to the online event here. The US Verso Books union has ratified its contract after

Yiyun Li. Photo: © Phillippe Matsas Alexandra Kleeman profiles novelist Yiyun Li for the New York Times Magazine, and writes about Li’s latest novel, The Book of Goose, which will be published next week. Among the questions Kleeman poses is one borrowed from a character in Li’s 2019 novel Where Reasons End: “What do you do all day?” Over email, Li explains why she tries to stay “midthought” throughout the day: “I don’t think writing is the beginning of the thought, the beginning happens before we start typing the first word; and usually the thought doesn’t end when a

Jean-Luc Godard. Photo: Gary Stevens/Wikimedia Commons In tribute to filmmaker and montage master Jean-Luc Godard, who died yesterday in Switzerland by assisted suicide, Leo Robson has “assembled some of my favourite statements made by and about the director over the past seventy years.” The Paris Review has shared a partial transcript from a 1979 conversation between Godard and the writer and filmmaker Marguerite Duras. In a remembrance published online at n+1, Blair McClendon writes: “I never have much to say to giants. It was enough to know that he was out there—smoking a cigar, whining, planning—while I was elsewhere

Javier Marías Javier Marías has died at age seventy. The Spanish writer, best known for his Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, was the author of more than fifteen novels, including Thus Bad Begins, and The Infatuations.  In 2018, Marías said in an interview with Garth Risk Hallberg, “A professor goes to give his lesson after 40 years . . . and the teacher knows he will give a good lesson, or at least a decent one. And he will do it with ease. And the carpenter who’s been making tables for 40 years or whatever knows he will succeed with

Hari Kunzru. Photo: Clayton Cubitt The New Yorker Festival tickets are now on sale. On Saturday, October 8, Andrew Solomon will talk with Rachel Aviv, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Hari Kunzru will talk with Parul Sehgal, and Elif Batuman and Gary Shteyngart will talk with Molly Fischer. On Sunday, October 9, Rachel Kushner and Ottessa Moshfegh will talk with Deborah Treisman.  Emma Straub has been posting tributes to her father, the award-winning horror writer Peter Straub, who died last week. Among the photos here is a handwritten list of poets that Peter recommended when Emma opened her Brooklyn bookstore

Yoko Tawada. Photo: Nina Subin  Sarah Jones offers a remembrance of activist and author Barbara Ehrenreich, who died last week, at Intelligencer. Jones first encountered Ehrenreich’s work when her mother was reading Nickel and Dimed. “What astonished me early about Ehrenreich’s work wasn’t just that she, as an individual, cared about the working poor, but that she could get others to do the same. From my vantage as the daughter of a precarious family, it looked like Ehrenreich had performed a magic trick. With time, though, I came to understand something about how she managed it. Ehrenreich’s power as

Donna Tartt. Photo: Beowulf Sheehan/Little, Brown For the New Statesman, Nick Burns reconsiders Donna Tartt’s novel The Secret History on its thirtieth anniversary. Reflecting on its continuing appeal, Burns notes that “Tartt’s characters take the world of Waugh’s Brideshead as a model for their tastes, attire, manner of speaking, and The Secret History offers an invitation into a select society devoted to this kind of re-enactment.”    The Root rounds up a list of books by Black authors to look forward to this month. Lit Hub suggests twenty-two novels to read this fall.  Community Bookstore is hosting a virtual event

NoViolet Bulawayo. © NyeLynTho The 2022 shortlist for the Booker Prize has been announced. Among the nominees are Elizabeth Strout’s Oh William!, Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, Percival Everett’s The Trees, NoViolet Bulawayo’s Glory, Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, and Alan Garner’s Treacle Walker.  Jay Caspian Kang, author of The Loneliest Americans, is joining the New Yorker as a staff column writer. Most recently, Kang contributed to the opinion section of the New York Times in a twice-weekly newsletter.  Real Life, an online magazine about living with technology founded in 2016, has lost funding and

Barbara Ehrenreich. Photo: Stephen Voss. Barbara Ehrenreich, an activist, journalist, and author of more than twenty books, had died at age eighty-one. In 2012, she founded the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, a program to support independent journalists and foster stories about inequality and poverty. Discussing the impetus for the project in a 2020 New Yorker interview with Jia Tolentino, Ehrenreich recalls writing stories for the New York Times Sunday Review about the recession, a project that she lost money on: “I thought, What kind of bullshit is this? Only rich people can write about poverty? That’s when the idea of

Rachel Aviv. Photo: Rose Lichter-Marck New Yorker staff writer Rachel Aviv will discuss her first book, Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us, tomorrow with Daniel Bergner in a panel at the Library of Congress National Book Festival. Several other events with the author have also been announced.  At The Atlantic, Derek Thompson looks at how the advice of best-selling personal finance books compares to economic theory. Thompson talked with James Choi, a Yale professor who studied fifty such books and recently published the paper “Popular Personal Financial Advice Versus the Professors.” Choi found that