Patrick Radden Keefe. Photo: Philip Montgomery On the Death Panel podcast, Jules Gill-Peterson and Charlie Markbreiter discuss a recent New York Times Magazine cover story about gender therapy and medical transition. And at the New Inquiry, Gill-Peterson and Bea Adler-Bolton talk about anti-trans policies, with Gill-Peterson observing, “In the face of such dire circumstances, it’s stunning that some of the most visible criticisms of these laws have reduced them to the realm of identity politics, as if the difference between pro- and anti- trans is whether or not you rhetorically bless trans people.”  In her Substack, Jessica Valenti argues

Octavia E. Butler. Photo: Nikolas Coukouma/Wikicommons Science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler was born on this day in 1947. To celebrate, London’s NTS Radio is broadcasting a full day of programming in her honor. And at Public Books, Sasha Ann Panaram offers an appreciation of Butler’s work and introduces an essay by Sheila Liming and an interview with Lynell George. You can read more about Butler’s life and work in the Spring 2021 issue of Bookforum, in which Gabrielle Bellot reviewed a Library of America edition of her novels and short stories.  Electric Literature has announced “Both/And,” a forthcoming

Imogen Binnie For the New Yorker, Stephanie Burt writes about Imogen Binnie’s Nevada and the invention of the trans novel. First published in 2013, Nevada was just reissued by FSG. Burt notes that for  Binnie, “Authenticity, not uplift, is the point.”  In the summer issue of the Paris Review, Lidija Haas conducts an “Art of Fiction” interview with Sigrid Nunez. They discuss Nunez’s linear process, writing about one’s parents, corresponding with readers about loss, and more. Of her recent novel The Friend, Nunez said: “There is some poet—it might have been Lowell—who said about his writing, ‘I want to

Margo Jefferson. Photo: © Claire Holt In the new issue of The Drift, Alexandra Kleeman, Christian Lorentzen, Tope Folarin, Hannah Gold, and more weigh in on the state of contemporary literary fiction: “​​Which styles are dying out, and which are flourishing? What’s changed since 2020, or even 2015? Glibly… did the pandemic kill autofiction?” BOMB magazine shares an archival interview with painter Duncan Hannah, who died on Saturday at the age of sixty-nine. In the 1982 interview, Simon Lane asked Hannah about his paintings of famous writers. Of James Joyce, the painter said: “People treat Joyce so seriously, and

Ruth Ozeki. Photo: Danielle Tait. Ruth Ozeki has won the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction for her novel The Book of Form and Emptiness. The Women’s Prize also hosts a podcast where you can listen to author interviews, get book recommendations, and more.   The Drift is throwing an issue-release party tonight at the Public Hotel in New York City.  For Vulture, Andrea Long Chu reviews Ottessa Moshfegh’s new novel, Lapvona, which is set in a medieval village. Chu writes of Moshfegh, who likes to revel in degradation and filth in her work, “These days, the leading coprophage of American

Megha Majumdar. Photo: © Elena Seibert The Washington Post’s Jeremy Barr interviews Joe Kahn, the new executive editor of the New York Times. Kahn doesn’t seem poised to make major changes at the paper, but shares former editor Dean Baquet’s belief that journalists should de-prioritize Twitter.  In the new issue of The Drift, Jake Bitte writes about Naomi Klein’s 2014 book This Changes Everything, greenwashing, and speculates about the future of green capitalism: “The world economy will cross the canyon on the tightrope of profit—instead of a Green New Deal, we will get a green Art of the Deal.” Bittle

Tonight, join us as we host the first episode of our new video series, “Off the Page,” featuring Margo Jefferson and Blair McClendon live in conversation. The virtual event is free if you RSVP here. Reviewing Jefferson’s new memoir, Constructing a Nervous System, for the spring issue of Bookforum, McClendon notes that for this book, Jefferson tried a new conception of autobiography: “Rather than using her life’s narrative to structure the book, she organizes her becoming through her models. Who, she asks herself, were those people she secreted away? In whose eyes did she see herself reflected?” Pantheon Books

Duncan Hannah Duncan Hannah—a deeply literary artist and the author of the memoir 20th-Century Boy—has died.  Lisa Lucas of Pantheon has acquired the new novel by Justin Taylor. Reboot is about a former child actor who is “charged with kissing the appropriate rings to in order to reboot the cult TV teen soap that made him famous, only to be pulled into a national scandal where the show itself becomes a flashpoint for the culture wars.”  Critic Laura Miller has won the Kukula Award for Excellence in Nonfiction Book Reviewing for her Slate essay about rereading Alice Sebold’s memoir

Pankaj Mishra  The editors of The Drift interview Pankaj Mishra about the mainstream media’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the West’s lack of historical memory, de-Americanization, and the collapse of American ideology abroad. “A lot of what we’re seeing today, whether it’s Modi’s Hindu chauvinism, Chinese supremacism, or Russian imperialism, is an attempt to resurrect or recreate or forward some kind of ‘indigenous’ ideology,” Mishra notes. “Because there’s a big vacuum there, left by a catastrophic loss of faith in America.”  National political reporter Felicia Sonmez has been fired from the Washington Post following a conflict over newsroom

Sloane Crosley. Photo: Beowulf Sheehan At Interview magazine, Sloane Crosley talks about her new novel, Cult Classic, with Lauren Oyler. Describing one of the book’s characters, Crosley notes, “We’re all victims of too much self-analysis, and we can collapse under the weight of the perfect decision, which is something that happens to her.” For Vanity Fair, Charlotte Klein details the turmoil at the Washington Post, as internal disputes spilled out onto Twitter, a high-profile reporter was suspended, another journalist called out the paper’s sexism and lack of accountability,  and star writer Taylor Lorenz publicly blamed a “miscommunication with an

Solmaz Sharif. Photo: Emma Larson/The Shipman Agency Rozina Ali profiles the Iranian American poet Solmaz Sharif, author of the collections Look and Customs, for Lux magazine. “One of the oft-repeated misconceptions of Sharif as a political poet is that she is not as concerned about aesthetics as she is about the message,” Ali writes. “She rejects this. For Sharif, language and liberation are tied, but if that was all there was to her work, she told me, she would have been an orator.” Words Without Borders has launched their redesigned and reconceived website, with contributions from Jhumpa Lahiri, Michael

Anne Carson. Photo: Peter Smith.  The summer issue of the Yale Review is out now, with Becca Rothfeld on the merits of high-school debate tournaments, Sarah Chihaya on reading Anne Carson after a breakup, and Terrance Hayes’s review of poet Tim Seibles (told in the form of a board game), and much more.    The New York Public Library is accepting applications for the 2023–2024 Cullman Center Fellowship.  At Gawker, Leah Finnegan covers the Twitter infighting at the Washington Post. Finnegan writes, “It’s funny how legacy papers can’t figure out their stance on social media. Their indecisiveness creates a culture

Arinze Ifeakandu. Photo: Bec Stupak Diop “What or who inspired you to start writing?” Jessica Swoboda asks Tobi Haslett in an interview published by The Point. Haslett responds: “Impossible question, in part because I’m one of those people who always wanted to be a writer. But I may or may not be freakish in that I can recall the specific moment when I decided that actually going for it might not be a complete waste of time. The spring I graduated from college, n+1 published an essay called ‘Cultural Revolution.’ It was a manifesto, or at least I read

Maxine Hong Kingston. Photo: Michael Lionstar/Penguin Random House On Monday, June 13, Maxine Hong Kingston will be joined in an online conversation by Gish Jen, author of The Resisters, at 92Y to celebrate the publication of a Library of America edition of Kingston’s books The Woman Warrior, Tripmaster Monkey, China Men, and other collected writings.  For the New York Review of Books, doctor and poet Laura Kolbe considers three new books that explore pain’s origins and how we attempt to explain and quantify pain: “Our appetite for explanation is large, because most of us have at some point deeply

Haley Mlotek For Columbia Journalism Review, Haley Mlotek considers a new biography of Anna Wintour, and speaks with its author, Amy Odell. Anna: The Biography is a deeply-researched unauthorized account of theVogue editor’s decades-long reign of the fashion world. Mlotek writes, “By a few measures, she may be considered the ‘final’ boss. Yet as her influence has grown, so has the imperative for substantial critique and for reckoning with what her power means.” The Washington Monthly magazine has announced the finalists of its Kukula Award for Excellence in Nonfiction Book Reviewing. Among the ten finalists are Becca Rothfeld for her

Walter Abish. Photo: New Directions Walter Abish, the experimental novelist, poet, and author of the acclaimed 1980 novel How German Is It, has died at the age of ninety. “My work invites interpretation,” Abish said in 2004. “To provide explanations is to inhibit the reader’s interaction. Often to explain is to explain away.” In an essay for Criterion, Angelica Jade Bastién writes about Billy Wilder’s 1994 film Double Indemnity, the power of the femme fatale, and “the suggestion of the racialized other” in noir films. For more on Wilder, see A. S. Hamrah’s essay on his life and work

Sarah Jaffe. Photo: Janice Checchio.  Sarah Jaffe writes about photographer Vivian Maier for The Nation. Reviewing a new biographer of Maier, Jaffe observes that the author, like many Maier scholars before her, doesn’t know what to make of the photographer’s lack of careerism and her day job as a nanny: The “book still treats Maier’s life and art as a riddle to be solved rather than as the complicated and contradictory products of a formidable intellect.”  The new issue of Bookforum is online now! In a special summer section, we asked writers to contribute essays, reviews, and reflections on

Phil Klay. Photo: Hannah Dunphy  Geetanjali Shree and translator Daisy Rockwell have won the International Booker Prize for Translated Fiction for Tomb of Sand. It is the first novel originally written in Hindi to win the prize.  At BOMB, Mark Haber discusseses his new novel Saint Sebastian’s Abyss with Ryan Chapman. Haber’s novel follows two art critics and former best friends who meet after a long falling out. The author tells Chapman about his attraction to the idea of “absolute knowledge”: “Having characters fixate on something as small as a tiny canvas painting, making it the guidepost of their

Francis Fukuyama For the New Yorker, Krithika Varagur reviews Francis Fukuyama’s Liberalism and Its Discontents, the political scientist’s defensive revisiting of the influential ideas he proposed in his 1989 essay (and later, book) “The End of History.” Varagur writes, “Liberalism could scarcely imagine a better cheerleader in this bleak landscape than Fukuyama, who has a unique skill for imbuing a sometimes ponderous ideology with a narrative thrust.” For the latest episode of the Artforum/Bookforum video series “Artists On Writers | Writers On Artists,” Elif Batuman talks about her new novel, Either/Or, with artist Sibel Horada.  Jane Hu writes for

Brandon Taylor. Photo: Brandon Taylor At the Columbia Journalism Review, Jon Allsop rounds up and reflects on media coverage of the school shooting yesterday in Uvalde, Texas, and “all the horribly repetitive cadences” of the responses to the tragedy. Yesterday at Politico, Chris Suellentrop described mass shootings as “America’s copy and paste tragedy.” Allsop argues that “this repetition need not hamstring coverage; it can be grimly illustrative and, if framed correctly, even galvanizing.”  Critic Jasmine Sanders will be leading a reading group at the Center for Fiction on Margo Jefferson’s new memoir Constructing a Nervous System and Willa Cather’s Künstlerroman The Song of the