Atlantic Books has acquired Namwali Serpell’s next two books: On Morrison, a book-length engagement with the Nobel Prize–winning author, and I Am Dead, a collection of twenty essays. Serpell posted in response to the news, “Delighted about this! There's no other mind I’d rather spend time with than Toni Morrison’s.” In 2022, Sarah Jaffe talked with Serpell about her novel The Furrows for Bookforum. 

The National Book Foundation has revoked Drew Barrymore’s invitation to host this year’s National Book Awards. The foundation cited Barrymore’s decision to resume production of her talk show: “The

Annie Ernaux’s latest novel, The Young Man, was published in English translation today. Ernaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize, was profiled in May by Rachel Cusk in the New York Times Magazine. You can read an excerpt of the novel in Vogue and a review by Jamie Hood in the new issue of Bookforum. 

The legendary independent bookstore City Lights is celebrating its seventieth birthday this year. The San Francisco store will host a full slate of poetry readings, book talks, and online panels and discussions.   

Kaitlin Phillips shares three books she’s read recently. Considering Elfriede

The Oslo-based online literary magazine Vinduet has published Merve Emre’s lecture on the function of criticism. Emre says, “To narrate the authority of criticism in all its richness and variety requires starting from the inside of this arrangement, from the critic’s mind, and working our way outward, to the contexts in which criticism circulates.” Her lecture does just that, ranging from the 1655 collection The World’s Olio, through considerations of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, and more. 

Paul Yamazaki, a bookseller who has worked at City Lights for more than

In a review of The Fraud for Vulture, Andrea Long Chu considers Zadie Smith’s trajectory as a novelist, arguing that since her debut in 2000 with White Teeth—which James Wood famously described as “hysterical realism”—Smith’s work has become increasingly moral and conventionally realist. Referencing Smith’s 2008 essay “Two Paths for the Novel,” Chu writes: “Her two paths for the novel have become a perfect circle: What could be more avant-garde in an age of data harvesting and identity politics than a heartfelt 19th-century novel?” 

“Did ChatGPT seriously just recommend I ‘delve into Proust’s

At the New Yorker, Rachel Monroe, the author of Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime and Obsession, reports on how rising population and rising temperatures are causing the state’s legendary swimming holes to dry up. 

At The Nation, Suchitra Vijayan, a barrister at law and the author of Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of Modern India, reports on India’s crackdown on Kashmir’s free press, exhibited most recently in the blocking of the website and social-media pages of the Kashmir Walla, an independent news outlet based in Srinagar.

The Queen Sofia Spanish Institute has

On the Slow Stories podcast, Chelsea Hodson talks about her writing and editing process and her new imprint, Rose Books, which just published Geoff Rickly’s debut novel Someone Who Isn’t Me. The episode begins with Rickly reading his work. 

Track Changes: A Handbook for Art Criticism has just been published by Paper Monument. The book, edited by Mira Dayal and Josephine Heston, collects essays by twenty-five editors and writers on the craft of critical writing. You can read excerpts on n+1 and LitHub and purchase the book from the n+1 store.     

In the Cleveland Review of Books, an A.V.

Bookforum is thrilled to share our Summer 2023 issue, the first published with the support of our new partner, The Nation. Online now, read Sarah Nicole Prickett on Jacqueline Rose and mourning, Moira Donegan on Judith Herman’s study of trauma, Christian Lorentzen on Don DeLillo’s Cold War novels, Jane Hu on Emma Cline’s The Guest, Harmony Holiday on Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes, and so much more. 

For Harper’s magazine, Adam Kirsch reviews Zadie Smith’s latest novel The Fraud, considering it in context of the work of other Gen X writers, including Sheila Heti, Tao Lin, Dave Eggers, and

On the New York Review of Books website, Willa Glickman interviews writer and philosopher FT. FT, aka Fuck Theory, is an anonymous author who publishes essays on his Patreon as well as writes for the NYR online, 4Columns, and Bookforum, among other publications. FT told Glickman: “I think I’m in an extremely fortunate and indeed somewhat archaic position for an intellectual without independent wealth, and I’m very grateful for it. I’m often broke but my mind lives a positively decadent lifestyle.”

Author Michelle Tea is launching her own press, Dopamine Books. “We want to nurture emerging

The New York Times’s Casey Schwartz profiles author Yunte Huang, and talks with him about Daughter of the Dragon, his new book on the Chinese American film star Anna May Wong. 

At Vulture, Isle McElroy, Maris Kreizman, Emma Alpern, and Jasmine Vojdani recommend some of the forthcoming books they’re looking forward to reading this fall, including new fiction from Teju Cole, Ed Park, Lexi Freiman, and more. 

Writer Grace Byron talks to Study Hall about her recent essay at The Cut, “The False Gospel of Conversion Therapy.” Byron tells Daniel Spielberger, “ Story-telling is not our best or only

For the New York Review of Books, Namwali Serpell reflects on her visit this spring to Princeton’s exhibit on Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, who died in 2019. “An exhibit of archival materials is about as close to putting an author in a museum as you can get,” Serpell writes. “It sits somewhere between, say, a tour of the writer’s home—which feels akin to celebrity worship—and an exploration of the writer’s words, which feels like the scholar’s remit. . . . The question that hovers over all literary tourism of this kind is: Who is this for?”

Filmmaker Anna Biller (Viva, The Love Witch) discusses

At n+1, Russian journalist Elena Kostyuchenko writes about why she left Ukraine, how she discovered that she has been poisoned, and how she continues to suffer from the poisoning. “I want to live. That’s why I’m writing this,” she says. “I also want my colleagues and friends, activists, and political refugees currently living abroad to be careful. More careful than I have been. We are not safe and we will not be safe until there is regime change in Russia. The work we do helps to bring this regime down, and it is defending itself.” Kostyuchenko’s book I Love Russia, which includes her reporting

This week’s must-read essay is Parul Sehgal’s profile of critic Jacqueline Rose. Rose’s new book of collected essays, The Plague: Living Death in Our Times, was just published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sehgal writes, “Lacan said that analysis did not take place in the present tense but in the future perfect—a way of looking back at what one will have become—and it is here that Rose seemed to dwell during our time together. ‘You’ll want to tease this out,’ she would note, of a particular detail. Or, ‘There’s a whole other story there, which I think is crucial for you.’ Holding up her finger,