Hundreds of National Endowment for the Arts grants for publications, artists and arts organizations, and theater groups have been terminated; Trump has also proposed eliminating the NEA entirely. n+1, which lost its NEA grant, has published a letter from four senior staffers of the NEA’s literary arts office who resigned in response to the cuts.
Percival Everett has won this year’s Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for his novel James; read Zain Khalid’s Bookforum review in our Summer 2024 issue. Among the other winners in literature: the playwright Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins, the biographer Jason Roberts, the graphic memoirist Tessa Hulls, the poet Marie Howe, and the writer Benjamin Nathans.
At The Nation, Juliana Spahr has written a remembrance of the poet, organizer, author of Riot Strike Riot, and professor Joshua Clover, who died in April at the age of sixty-two. Spahr, who coauthored the 2014 poetry book #Misanthropoece: 24 Theses with Clover, writes: “Those who want to pay homage might donate to their local bail fund, or I am sure many of you can imagine some ways to refuse to die that would have surprised him if he was still here.”
Pioneer Works has published a transcript of a discussion they hosted on literary takedowns with Lauren Oyler and Brandon Taylor. “There’s a lot of projection,” Taylor says. “You could have written a perfectly studied negative review and published it, and people would still act as though you’ve just walked into the author’s house and killed them and all their pets. I think there’s this presupposition that if you write a negative review, you’re doing it for a whole host of careerist or antisocial reasons and not because you just didn’t like the book.”
In the second issue of Kismet magazine, the editors ask contributors to “share the sacred objects that sit on their desks.” Catherine Lacey: “Nothing is more talismanic than this little bottle of potion given to me by the writer Brenda Lozano, something she made out of I don’t know what, meant to aid in creative work.” Paul Dalla Rosa: “I was gifted this little friar a year ago. You can twist his head off and fill his body with port.”