Ayesha A. Siddiqi talks with New Inquiry editor Charlie Markbreiter about “the end of an era, its ‘main characters,’ web 2.0 & the real difference between Gen Z and Millenials.” “The last decade of fiction starring single late 20s-early 30s white women recycles different iterations of the same boring, selfish, reckless, cynical and unmoored depressive figure with a dissatisfying sex life that they organize the rest of their lives around,” Siddiqi says. “The self-sabotaging white woman is to the 20teens what the flailing dad was to 90s family comedies, an era defining trope. These women are always unhappy in the same ways, always vying for love in places they are guaranteed not to receive it.”
Random House will publish a new story collection by George Saunders on October 18. According to the publisher, Liberation Day, which will include nine stories, is a “book that inhabits, and tries to reckon with, a world that seems to be losing its grip on its own humanity, with Saunders’ signature blend of darkness, hilarity, and hope.” Saunders says: “I’ve found these last few years riveting and strangely clarifying. Everything that’s always been happening to people on earth now seems to be happening…faster. I tried to get some of that percussive energy into Liberation Day, as well as some of the joy of being alive in such a strange, transitional, dangerous moment.”
The American Academy of Arts and Letters has announced the winners of its 2022 literature awards, who include Stephen Dobyns, Lynne Tillman, Jo Ann Beard, Sarah Manguso, Joshua Cohen, Patricia Lockwood, and Kirsten Valdez Quade.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux has announced that it will publish two new books by New Yorker staff writer Alex Ross. New Under the Sun, which is slated for publication in 2025, is “a rich, surprising narrative history of the German-speaking émigrés who settled in Los Angeles from the 1920s to the 1950s, helping to launch modernist waves in architecture, film, music, and literature.” Sound Alone, which will be released in 2028, is “a concise and eclectic history of classical music told through 10 forms, including chant, mass, opera, the symphony, and contemporary soundscapes.”
The New Yorker has published Matvei Yankelevich and John High’s new translation of Osip Mandelstam’s 1937 antiwar poem “Verses on the Unknown Soldier.”
Tonight, the New York Public Library will host an in-person discussion featuring Irish writers Fintan O’Toole (author of the new We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland) and Belinda McKeon (author of the novels Solace and Tender).