The renowned poet, civil rights activist, and longtime Virginia Tech professor of English Nikki Giovanni has died at the age of eighty-one. Giovanni came up during the Black Arts Movement, self-publishing her debut collection of poems, Black Feeling, Black Talk in 1968 with the help of friends. She went on to publish more than twenty-five books, writing in support of Black Power, revisiting her childhood, documenting her struggles with cancer, and more. Barbara Crosby wrote of Giovanni in 2003, “All I know is that she is the most cowardly, bravest, least understanding, most sensitive, slowest to anger, most quixotic, lyingest, most honest woman I know.” At the time of her death Giovanni was at work on a new poetry collection; The Last Book will be published posthumously in fall 2025.
The recipients of this year’s Whiting Foundation grants for creative nonfiction have been announced. The ten grantees—including Bookforum contributor and Parapraxis magazine cofounder Hannah Zeavin—will each receive $40,000 to support work on their books in progress.
In his review for The Baffler of Edwin Frank’s Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel, Bruce Robbins observes: “The novel under consideration always seems craftier and wiser than the naive, plodding, always offended critic, especially a critic given to moral and political judgments. The rhetoric works. Who wants to quarrel with praise for superior wisdom? Novels often seem wiser than their readers. But this can’t always be true, can it? To an academic, at least, the repetition of this appreciative, even reverential posture is a little off-putting.”
The winter issue of the Paris Review is out now, featuring interviews with Hanif Kureishi, Gerald Murnane, and the late Fredric Jameson, new writing by Caoilinn Hughes, Adania Shibli, Rachel Mannheimer, Sargon Boulus, and more.
For the London Review of Books, Patricia Lockwood writes a diary about The X-Files: “The real reason everyone loved the show was not because it was about alien autopsies but because it was about motel rooms. Forced proximity, everyone desired that, for how else could anything happen?”