Poets & Writers has a profile of Namwali Serpell ahead of the publication of her new novel, The Furrows. The book is a winding tale of grief and uncertainty centered on a missing child, which Serpell began writing in 2008. In 2020, she was in the process of a big revision when the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd by police occured. As she explains, “Those two events didn’t change the content of what I was writing, but they changed the urgency of what I was trying to get at in two senses: confronting death and confronting the racial politics.”
Jewish Currents has released a new set of guidelines for working with freelancers. The agreement comes out of conversations with the Freelance Solidarity Project of the National Writers Union with the goal of ensuring “that all of our freelance contributors—responsible for some of the most powerful work we have published—are treated with the respect they deserve and compensated equitably for their work.”
Vulture reports that sales of Salman Rushdie’s books have dramatically increased since the author was attacked at a reading last week.
Dwight Garner pans Jared Kushner’s memoir, observing that “Kushner writes as if he believes foreign dignitaries (and less-than dignitaries) prized him in the White House because he was the fresh ideas guy, the starting point guard, the dimpled go-getter,” while the reality was that he was in demand because he was “a soft touch.”
Christopher Blackwell, an incarcerated writer, contributes a New York Times op-ed arguing against banning books in prison. Blackwell writes, “Claiming such bans are necessary for the safety and security of prisons seems ludicrous. If anything, many banned books could contribute to a safer environment in prisons and in the societies incarcerated individuals are released into.”
