• Vinson Cunningham. Photo: Jane Bruce.
    March 13, 2024

    Events this week: Vinson Cunningham with Doreen St. Felix; Kate Zambreno with Jamie Hood

    The UK–based Women’s Prize for Fiction has announced its 2024 longlist, which includes Maya Binyam’s Hangman, Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost, Chetna Maroo’s Western Lane, and more.

    Tonight, Vinson Cunningham will discuss his new novel Great Expectations with  Doreen St. Felix at Greenlight Books in Brooklyn. Recently, Cunningham discussed his not-very-Dickensian book about coming of age as a staffer on the first Obama campaign with David Remnick, recalling that the title first came up as a joke from a colleague. Cunningham says of Obama’s role in public life after his presidency: “I will admit

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  • Rachel Cusk. Photo: Siemon Scamell-Katz
    March 06, 2024

    Erik Baker on Aaron Bushnell; Merve Emre and Rachel Cusk in conversation

    Online at n+1, Erik Baker writes about Aaron Bushnell, the US’s illegal use of incendiary weapons on civilians, and the history of self-immolation as protest. “The purpose of lighting yourself on fire is not to encourage other people to light themselves on fire. It is to scream to the world that you could find no alternative, and in that respect it is a challenge to the rest of us to prove with our own freedom that there are other ways to meaningfully resist a society whose cruelty has become intolerable.”

    PEN America has announced the winners of its 2023 literary prizes. Among the awardees

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  • Fady Joudah. Photo: Cybelle Knowles.
    February 28, 2024

    Aria Aber in conversation with Palestinian-American poet Fady Joudah

    In the Yale Review, Aria Aber interviews poet Fady Joudah. Joudah wrote his latest book,  [...], in about ten weeks beginning in October 2023. He tells Aber, “Palestinians are much more than a repository of wounds; portraying us as such can’t lead to much more than pity.” 

    On the Verso Books blog, Katie Tobin writes about Simone Weil, the Catholic mystic Marxist philosopher and author who died at age thirty-four in 1943. Weil has seen a resurgence lately, featuring prominently in Jacqueline Rose’s recent book The Plague, Octavia Bright’s memoir This Ragged Grace, and Lars Iyer’s new novel, My

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  • Carson McCullers: Photo: Carl Van Vechten, 1959
    February 27, 2024

    Language poet Lyn Hejinian has died; Maggie Doherty on Carson McCullers

    Maggie Doherty reviews Mary V. Dearborn’s biography of Carson McCullers, author of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, for the New Yorker: “A child in life, McCullers probed the emotional complexities of youth in her fiction. She is one of the great writers of American girlhood, someone who might be mentioned in the same breath as Louisa May Alcott and Judy Blume. But she was not a sentimentalist, or a young-adult author; rather, she used the techniques of literary modernism to depict the world as the child sees it, producing sophisticated works of fiction for a sophisticated crowd.” 

    Poet, essayist,

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  • Sloane Crosley. Photo: Jennifer Linvingston
    February 20, 2024

    Becca Rothfeld on David Cronenberg; Sloane Crosley in conversation with Sigrid Nunez

    Next Monday at Books Are Magic in Brooklyn Heights, novelist and essayist Sloane Crosley will discuss her new book Grief Is for People with Sigrid Nunez. The book is a memoir about Crosley losing her best friend to suicide. 

    Read an excerpt from Bookforum contributor Becca Rothfeld’s debut essay collection, All Things Are Too Small, in the New Yorker. Discussing David Cronenberg’s body-horror films, sex, and the “interhuman,” Rothfeld writes: “Cronenberg must resort to drastic tactics if he is to remind his audience to want what the civilized world is bent on neutering, and fictionalization

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  • Sophie Pinkham
    February 14, 2024

    Tricia Romano on author Joe Wood;  Sophie Pinkham in conversation with Merve Emre

    Tricia Romano, whose oral history of the legendary alt-weekly the Village Voice is out now, has written a remembrance of writer and editor Joe Wood, who wrote for the paper and many other publications before his disappearance in 1999. “He was on a public intellectual, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Stanley Crouch type of path,” says Colson Whitehead, who worked for VLS, the Voice’s literary supplement, before he went on to become a Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist. “It was always much more serious than the stuff I felt I was doing and admirable in that way.”

    On Friday at 6:30, the New School will host a

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  • Medaya Ocher 
    February 13, 2024

    Medaya Ocher is the new editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books

    Medaya Ocher has been named the new editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books. Previously, Ocher was the managing editor and senior editor at LARB, and currently hosts the magazine’s podcast. 

    In a preview from the forthcoming issue of The Drift, Julia Rock profiles Norman Finkelstein, the political scientist, longtime anti-Zionist, and author of the influential and controversial 2000 book The Holocaust Industry. “Finkelstein remains most comfortable on the margins,” Rock writes. “Ideologically aligned with a left that won’t always have him, platformed by a right that won’t always

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  • Billy Childish, cave, light and island, 2020, oil and charcoal on linen, 96 × 60". Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London. Photo: Rikard Osterlund.
    February 06, 2024

    The new issue of Bookforum; Rosa Lyster on Janet Flanner

    The Winter 2024 issue of Bookforum is online now! Subscribe today to get the print edition as soon as possible, and donate here to support what we do. 

    The Center for Fiction and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop are hosting a discussion of Diane Oliver’s posthumously published short story collection, Neighbors. The February 21 event with guests Jamel Brinkley, Lan Samantha Chang, and Dawnie Walton will also be live-streamed. 

    At the Paris Review, Rosa Lyster writes about Janet Flanner, who covered the Nuremberg trials, the Nazi occupation of France, and the evacuation of Paris, among other subjects,

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  • Andrea Long Chu. Photo: New York Magazine.
    January 31, 2024

    Merve Emre and Andrea Long Chu discuss criticism; Grace Byron on Anna Kornbluh

    In the first episode of a new podcast, The Critic and Her Publics, Merve Emre talks to Andrea Long Chu. LitHub is partnering with the New York Review of Books to publish transcripts of the discussions, which are taken from a lecture series hosted by Emre at Wesleyan University. As part of the event, Emre invited Chu to perform a bit of criticism on the spot: a response to Zoe Leonard’s 1992 textual artwork “I want a president.” 

    For the Paris Review Daily, Emmeline Clein visits the Kentwood Historical and Cultural Museum, otherwise known as the Britney Spears house, in the singer’s Louisiana

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  • N. Scott Momaday
    January 30, 2024

    Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and novelist N. Scott Momaday has died

    The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and novelist N. Scott Momaday died last week at the age of eighty-nine. His debut novel House Made of Dawn, published in 1968, was one of the first novels published by a Native American writer about Native American life, and has been called the harbinger of the Native American Renaissance. Momaday considered himself primarily a poet. In his 2022 “Art of Poetry” interview (currently unpaywalled), he told the Paris Review: “Part of the process is living with a poem for some time before you know what it is. It’s best to recognize that you’re not going to write many

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  • Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. Photo: Alex M. Philip. 
    January 25, 2024

    National Book Critics Circle finalists announced; Kwame Adjei-Brenyah in conversation with Roxane Gay tonight in New York

    The National Book Critics Circle has announced its 2023 award finalists. In addition to the five finalists in six categories, Becca Rothfeld won the 2023 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, Judy Blume received the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, and American Library Association took home the Toni Morrison Achievement Award. The winners will be announced on March 21 in New York.

    Tonight at Word Up bookstore in New York, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah will discuss his latest novel, Chain Gang All Stars, with Roxane Gay.

    Fragile Juggernaut is a new podcast about the history

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  • Greil Marcus. Photo: Ida Lødemel Tvedt
    January 23, 2024

    Greil Marcus’s philosophy of criticism; Conde Nast union workers walkout today

    Unionized workers across several Conde Nast publications are walking out today in protest of “the unlawful handling of layoff negotiations and bad-faith bargaining.” Over 400 workers are holding a work stoppage and rally today, and asking readers to respect a digital picket line of GQ, Vanity Fair, Bon Appétit, Vogue, and other publications.

    For the latest issue of the Yale Review, Greil Marcus considers “Why I Write” and what criticism means to him. For Marcus, it started with reviewing the Rolling Stones album Let It Bleed in 1969: “Why am I reacting to this so intensely? Why does this make

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