Roxane Gay has announced the first three books that will be published by her new Grove Atlantic imprint: And Then He Sang a Lullaby, the debut novel from twenty-three-year-old Nigerian writer and activist Ani Kayode Somtochukwu; J. V. Lyon’s novel Lush Lives; and Hot Springs Drive, a novel from Lindsay Hunter, the author of Ugly Girls and Eat Only When You’re Hungry.
Larua Miller writes about Mick Herron’s “hilarious, unique” spy novels, which are the inspiration for the new TV series Slow Horses, starring Gary Oldman, Kristin Scott Thomas, and Jonathan Pryce. “If James Bond is a fantasy of British intelligence still coasting on the uncomplicated glamor of having helped win World War II, and John le Carré’s George Smiley offers the corrective vision of Cold War moral ambiguity, Herron’s Slow Horses are Gen X spies: sidelined, bored, saddled with the worst boss in the world.”
At the Paris Review, Craig Morgan Teicher writes an appreciation of poet and translator Richard Howard. “He was the last of a certain type of literary person, of which I am tempted also to call him the first—I can think of no one like him, except perhaps Robert Browning or Henry James, two of the writers whose work most profoundly animated his life,” Teicher writes. “His approach to literature was both comprehensive and conversational—he lived in the books he loved, all the time, was ever in the midst of talking about them, ever encountering the great writers in his imagination, and reawakening them in poems that staged impossible meetings between literary and historical figures.”
Book Deals: Hogarth has bought Anuk Arudpragasam’s new novel, which depicts “an intense friendship between two young people who fled war in Sri Lanka as children . . . and meet for the first time as adults in New York.” Flatiron Books has purchased the first novel by New York Times cultural critic Alexis Soloski, Here in the Dark, “about a young theater critic who learns the dangerous consequences of blurring reality and performance.”
On September 20, Doubleday will publish The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021, by New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker and New Yorker writer Susan Glasser. The publisher is billing the book as “an ambitious first cut at this historical moment.”
Tomorrow, Chloé Cooper Jones starts the tour for her new memoir Easy Beauty, which she will be discussing with Lincoln Michel, Rachel Aviv, and Anna Weiner, among others.