The Authors Guild filed a class action lawsuit this week against the NEH and DOGE “for unlawfully terminating millions of dollars in committed grants from funds appropriated by Congress for the programs.” 

In a guest essay for the New York Times Opinion section, George Saunders responds to the Trump administration’s firing of Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden: “The White House, tossing out nonsense from its meager box of repetitive right-wing auto-defenses, claimed on Friday that Dr. Hayden had, ‘in the pursuit of D.E.I.,’ done ‘quite concerning things.’ Did it name those things? It did not. It couldn’t have.”

The Paris Review has published a talk by Hannah Zeavin about poets and psychoanalysis: “The number of papers on poetry alone that I had to proof, across just a few years’ time as the managing editor of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, offers us data on the import of poetry to psychoanalysis, and that’s without going to Freud, who basically owned up to the fact that the poets invented psychoanalysis.” Zeavin discusses John Ashbery and Bernadette Mayer’s treatment, and points out that the term “writer’s block” was coined by an analyst (“Writing stops when the writer is stopped up: there is an inner conflict that can no longer be resolved through sublimation”).

For the London Review of Books, Anne Enright considers Helen Garner’s diaries: “The amazing thing about this oddly kiltered book is the way it argues so powerfully against Garner’s own point of view.”

The McNally Jackson Festival is underway, featuring discussions with authors on different subjects under the theme “Preservation of Record.” Tomorrow night, Prudence Peiffer will discuss her book The Slip, which Jennifer Krasinski reviewed in the Summer 2023 issue of Bookforum, with Joshua Jelly-Schapiro.