Elif Batuman. Photo: Valentyn Kuzan. At the New Republic, Sophie Haigney writes about Elif Batuman’s new novel, Either/Or: “One of Batuman’s abiding preoccupations is how literature intersects with life. She has expressed a general preference for nonfiction over contemporary fiction, for its ability to engage with reality.” At LitHub, Batuman talks about writing the book and the process of looking back at her college-age self: “When I look back at that time, it would be easy to say, oh, the wool was really pulled over my eyes and I was really tricked and I really fell for something and

Adrian Matejka Rowan Ricardo Phillips interviews Adrian Matejka, who was recently named the editor of Poetry, becoming the first Black person to hold the position in the magazine’s history. Matejka, whose books include Somebody Else Sold the World, shares his vision for the publication, saying that he wants to “make the magazine more inclusive and available while also developing its outward-facing component.” He continues: “I’m a believer in poetry as action as well as art. Some of my favorite poets do their best work in libraries and orchards and jazz clubs. I want the magazine to embody that public

Elaine Hsieh Chou. Photo: © Cindy Trinh For Liberties, Morton Høi Jensen reflects on what we expect from biographies, the “biographical fallacy,” and works of fiction that lean on biographical information. “All writers lead double lives: one on the page, one off,” Jensen writes. “And no account or portrait of a writer’s life will resolve this fissure. There will always be a scandalizing disproportion between the human messiness of a writer’s life and the size, the scope, and the opacity of their fictional work.” For the New York Times, Marc Tracy outlines how liberal cultural arbiters are responsible for

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò. Photo: Jared Rodriguez. For the London Review of Books, Hazel V. Carby compares Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project to a new HBO series directed by Raoul Peck, Exterminate All the Brutes, and reflects on the limited usefulness of the phrase “the afterlife of slavery” and the term “antiblackness” when used without historical specificity. Carby writes that The 1619 Project’s aim “places it firmly within the conventional narrative of American exceptionalism,” while Peck’s series “refuses to conform to narrative linearity, rejecting the idea that the current resurgence of white supremacist and state violence can be traced back

Eileen Myles. Photo: Shae Detar At Jewish Currents, Josh Lambert writes about some of the best new Jewish literature published in the last year that deals with questions of gender and sexual politics, including Melissa Broder’s Milk Fed, Sam Cohen’s Sarahland, and Hanna Halperin’s Something Wild.  New York Times city correspondent Alex Vadukul talks with poet and novelist Eileen Myles about their advocacy for the trees of East River Park, which is being demolished. Myles moved to New York in the 1970s, when “there was time to waste, and that’s the thing everybody deserves. And the park is wasted

Rick Perlstein Historian Rick Perlstein’s next book, The Infernal Triangle, has been sold to Little, Brown. In his new volume, Perlstein plans to track American politics from 2000 to the present, with an eye toward “Republican viciousness, Democratic fecklessness, and media incompetence.” Perlstein tweeted that the book will be available in time for the 2024 conventions. In 2020, Perlstein talked with Leon Neyfakh, Sam Adler-Bell, and Matthew Sitman about how the right keeps on winning.      The Atlantic has launched its expanded books coverage with essays by Vivian Gornick, Caitlin Flanagan, Imbolo Mbue, and more. For the latest installment of

Jelani Cobb. Photo: Calla Kessler Author and New Yorker staff writer Jelani Cobb has been named the new dean of the Columbia School of Journalism. Cobb, who has worked at Columbia since 2016 and is currently the director of the Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights, is the author of The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress, To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic, and other books.   Patricia Lockwood has won the £20,000 Dylan Thomas prize for her first novel, No One Is Talking About

Sara Nović. Photo: Zach Stone Bard College is reversing its decision to stop publishing Conjunctions, and has committed to publish the literary journal for three more years. Contributors to their forthcoming fall issue include Carmen Maria Machado, Yxta Maya Murray, Can Xue, and more.  At The Guardian, Sara Nović discusses the deaf writing community, her second novel, True Biz, and why ASL has been important to her as a deaf writer working in English: “Language bears more than the work of communicating with the mainstream world; it is also the internal vehicle for our thoughts and feelings, the mechanism

A. J. Verdelle The Washington Post is establishing a bureau in Kyiv to help cover the war in Ukraine. Isabelle Khurshudyan has been named bureau chief with Max Bearak as the lead Ukraine correspondent.   Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was killed while covering Israeli army raids in Jenin. Abu Akleh reported for Al Jazeera for twenty-five years. Dalia Hatuqa, a journalist and friend of Abu Akleh said in a New York Times article, “I know of a lot of girls who grew up basically standing in front of a mirror and holding their hair brushes and pretending to be

Meaghan Winter. Photo: Rose Lichter-Marck  The New York Review of Books is publishing a series of responses to the leaked Supreme Court draft decision that would overturn Roe v. Wade. Most recently, Meaghan Winter writes about how “Democrats have been defeatist about abortion for decades.” Among the other contributors are Charlotte Shane, Annette Gordon-Reed, Anne Enright, Liza Batkin, and more. The founders and former editors of The Believer have published a letter addressing the magazine’s new ownership by a firm called Paradise Media. The former owners at the University of Nevada Las Vegas announced in October 2021 that they

Joshua Cohen The 2022 Pulitzer Prizes have been announced: Joshua Cohen received the award for fiction, the late Winfred Rembert won a posthumous award for his illustrated autobiography (as told to Erin I. Kelly), and Diane Seuss won the poetry prize. Here’s a full list of winners.   For the New York Times, Jackson Arn reviews two new novels about art: Emily Hall’s The Longcut and Mark Haber’s Saint Sebastian’s Abyss. Arn writes, “Characters in novels about art . . . tend to be frauds: weaselly dealers, greedy collectors, hack painters and shallow critics who pretend art is about truth

Louise Glück. Photo: Katherine Wolkoff At Lit Hub, Jumi Bello writes about her mental illness, and how and why she plagiarized parts of her debut novel, The Leaving. The book was set to be published on July 12 but was canceled by Riverhead after it was revealed that the book contained multiple passages by other writers. In response, Gawker points out that this personal essay, too, “looks very plagiarized.”  Ukrainian author Artem Chapeye has sold his debut story collection, The Ukraine, to Seven Stories Press.  Zenia Tompkins will translate. The title story appeared in the New Yorker. Chapeye, who

Melissa Gira Grant. Photo: Verso Starting tonight, Metrograph theater in Manhattan is hosting a series, “Stumbling onto Wildness: Cookie Mueller on Film,” featuring films and events celebrating the late writer, actress, advice columnist, and downtown raconteur. This evening’s movie, “A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking,” is doubling as the book launch for a new Mueller collection and a new chapbook by Natasha Stagg.        For 4Columns, Beatrice Loayza writes about Happening, Audrey Diwan’s new film, which is based on Annie Ernaux’s memoir of getting an illegal abortion in 1963 France.  At the New Republic, Melissa Gira Grant discusses how

Claire-Louise Bennett For The Baffler, Rhian Sasseen looks at Claire-Louise Bennett’s new novel Checkout 19 and the literature of the supermarket: “If the pandemic has made one thing clear, it’s that it is in the aisles of the supermarket where society’s biggest problems and anxieties mingle.” The Guardian has released new social-media guidelines for staff, including prohibitions against putting scoops on Twitter, criticizing colleagues, and a warning that it’s a bad idea to Tweet “partisan” opinions. In The Nation, Alex Jen writes about photographer An-My Lê.  Electric Literature has a newly translated story by the late Danish author Tove

Volodymyr Zelensky. Photo: Ukrainian Presidential Press Service. For The Cut, Rebecca Traister looks at the Democratic party’s flawed approach to abortion politics and the ways in which it has lost the messaging war: “While Republicans could commit to their bit with theatrical force, the left has been unwilling to embrace the real, nonfiction, moral urgency of their cause.”  On May 5, Lux magazine and Haymarket books are hosting “Feminists vs. the War Machine,” a panel featuring Rozina Ali, Margo Okazawa-Re, Sophie Pinkham, and Sarah Leonard.  The New York Times has released its first-quarter report on subscribers and revenue. The

Gerald Murnane. Photo: Ian Hill The new issue of The Baffler is out now, featuring Shamira Ibrahim on the working class, Molly Osberg on Starbuck CEO’s union-busting tactics, Dan Albert on the politics of mass transit in the US, Max Nelson on the East German writer Brigette Reiman, Charlie Lee on Halldór Laxness’s political fictions, and more.  For Vulture, Max Pearl profiles Mexican novelist Fernanda Melchor, the author most recently of Paradais. Melchor first explored the themes she writes about while in journalism school, and her fiction is often compared to noir and true-crime. “I’m a story collector,” she

John Keene. Photo: Nina Subin At Politico, Max Tani points out that Julie Pace and Darlene Superville’s Jill: A Biography of the First Lady, released by Little, Brown in April, sold only about two hundred and fifty copies in its first week. Pace and Superville are White House correspondents, and according to Tani, their book’s sluggish sales is just one example of how covering the White House in the age of Biden has “become a bore.”  Another run of Matthew Gasda’s play Dimes Square, the cast of which includes book critic Christian Lorentzen, has been scheduled for late May.

Elizabeth McCracken. Photo: ​​Edward Carey At Black Perspectives, the blog of the African American Intellectual History Society, Robert Greene II recommends a handful of books coming out this spring and summer, including Irvin J. Hunt’s Dreaming the Present, Marcy J. Dinus’s The Textual Effects of David Walker’s “Appeal”, and Jeremy Schipper’s Denmark Vesey’s Bible.  Deadline reports that Andy Serkis will direct Nick Hornby’s film adaptation of Elizabeth McCracken’s 1996 novel The Giant’s House.   For the New Republic, Osita Nwanevu writes about how films about the political system and D.C. politics—like Michael Ritchie’s The Candidate (1972) and Mick Nichols’s Primary

Leslie Jamison In Astra magazine, Leslie Jamison writes about daydreams: “I’ve spent my whole life daydreaming. It embarrasses me to think of tallying the hours. It feels like ingratitude. It feels like infidelity. It’s often been about infidelity.” It’s the publication’s first issue, with stories by Catherine Lacey, Fernanda Melchor, Ottessa Moshfegh, and more.  At n+1, Judith Levine reports from a labor rally at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island: “The brisk air vibrated with militant rank-and-file socialist unionism.”  For “24 Twitter Moments We Treasure: Sure, it’s hell. But what about the magic?” in Intelligencer, writers round up the best

Ruth Ozeki  The six shortlisted novels for this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction are Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle, Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss, Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness, Lisa Allen-Agostini’s The Bread the Devil Knead, Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees, and Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence.  Poets Writers announced yesterday that Sonia Sanchez—author of Homegirls and Handgrenades, I’ve Been a Woman, and many other collections—is the 2022 Jackson Poetry Prize recipient. Sanchez was chosen by the poet-judges Mary Jo Bang, Marilyn Chin, and Claudia Rankine, who wrote in their citation: “Her vast and commanding oeuvre