Richard Howard, former poet laureate of New York, essayist, and translator of Roland Barthes, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Charles Baudelaire, Simone de Beauvoir, and many other French writers, died on Thursday at the age of ninety-two. His 1969 collection, Untitled Subjects, which presents dramatic monologues given by fifteen Victorians and Edwardians, won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. As the editor of George Braziller’s publishing house’s poetry series, he championed younger poets including Charles Simic and Frank Bidart; he was also poetry editor of the Paris Review in the 1990s and early 2000s. Howard is remembered by many readers, and survived by his husband, David Alexander.
For the Paris Review Daily, Hannah P. Gold writes about David Wojnarowicz, his archives, and her fandom: “So David reached through the decades and caught me by the wrist, calling the bluff of our intimacy. I sat stunned, because there is no remedy for this feeling that no, it would have been different with me—just more projection.”
In the New Left Review’s Sidecar blog, Alex Zevin, author of Liberalism at Large, surveys the reactions to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by the American liberal and left media, finding that “a significant section of the left has failed to think beyond a liberal interventionist framework, even if it disagrees with aspects of Biden’s response.”
Katy Waldman profiles Emily St. John Mandel, whose latest novel Sea of Tranquility will be published next week, for the New Yorker. “Mandel—with her flexible plots, which spin out intricate counterlives and permutations,” unsettles the contract of writerly authority, Waldman writes. “She weaponizes her doubt, or strategically deploys it, to break a fundamental rule: Maybe things didn’t happen as I said.
Sublunary Editions, a small press based in Seattle, will publish Herman Melville’s Isle of the Cross this fall. According to the publishers, the manuscript of the lost novel was recently found in a Cape Cod attic by archivists. (April Fool’s.)