New York Times book critic and obituary writer Christopher Lehmann-Haupt has died at the age of eighty-four. Lehmann-Haupt worked at the paper for over thirty years, during which he wrote 4,000 essays and reviews. “Readers and colleagues called him a judicious, authoritative voice on fiction and a seemingly boundless array of history, biography, current events and other topics, with forays into Persian archaeology and fly fishing,” writes Robert D. McFadden.
New York Review of Books contributors have signed an open letter condemning the Trump administration’s continued detention of migrant children who have been separated from their parents. “This generation will be remembered for having allowed for concentration camps for children to be built on ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave,’ write contributors including Margaret Atwood, Elif Batuman, Deborah Eisenberg, and more. “This is happening here and now, but not in our names.”
At The Rumpus, Nicole Chung talks to Crystal Hana Kim about memory, family, and her new memoir, All You Can Ever Know.
LitHub talks to 2018 National Book Award in Nonfiction finalists Victoria Johnson and Colin G. Calloway.
Former congressman Steve Israel writes about the struggles of being an author on book tour, which to him was worse than his experience as a political figure. “As a congressman I’d stand in a room with hundreds of supporters, gripping and being gripped, posing for selfies, signing autographs. . . . I’d go to the House floor, stride to the podium and give a speech that was watched on C-Span by, well, hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of people. I was even recognized in airports,” he writes. “Now I’m like the guy sitting at a flea market folding table, watching people pass him by, oblivious to his World’s Greatest Dad hand-painted mugs.”
Tonight at Symphony Space in New York, John Cameron Mitchell and Karen Pittman read new works of fiction by George Saunders and Zadie Smith.