South Side Weekly has extensive local coverage of the police shooting of thirteen-year-old Adam Toledo, including two op-eds, “Blaming the Victim” and “We are Adam Toledo”; and a timeline of the Chicago Police Department’s killing of children. The paper also has an article about who gets to define a mass shooting.

At the London Review of Books, Andrea Brady writes about How to Carry Water, a new selection of poems by Lucille Clifton. The first poem in the book is an elegy for Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes. “Clifton is often compared to him,” Brady writes, but “while she shares his

The 2021 Whiting Award winners have been announced. The honorees will each receive a $50,000 prize to support their work in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama, and this year include Tope Folarin, Joshua Bennett, Xandria Phillips, Marwa Helal, among others.

For the fifteenth anniversary of the New York Times Book Review podcast, editor Pamela Paul selects fifteen of her favorite episodes.

Melissa Gira Grant, a staff writer at the New Republic, and the author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work, has sold a new book. A Woman Is Against the Law will be published by Little, Brown.

In

At the Chronicle of Higher Education, Jonathan Russell Clark profiles academic, author, and critic Merve Emre. They discuss writing across modes, community, and Emre’s stance that good criticism should be pedagogic. For her, the appeal of writing criticism for general audiences lies in its flexibility: “you can think historically, you can use close reading, you can use personal anecdote, you can be artful, you can tell a story while also making an argument. And none of those things needs to detract from one another—they can all be totally syncretic, and add up to something that, yes, might be

The Paris Review Board of Directors has announced that N. Scott Momaday will receive their 2021 Hadada Award, and that Eloghosa Osunde has won the 2021 Plimpton Prize for her story “Good Boy.”

More than 650 tech workers at the New York Times have formed a union. The group will be represented by NewsGuild of New York. As Katie Robinson, the media reporter for the Times, notes, the Times tech-workers union follows recent unionization efforts at Google, the New Yorker, Vox media, BuzzFeed News, Slate, and Vice.

For T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Cathy Park Hong writes about her long-distance

The Our Struggle podcast has released its two-hour interview with translator and biographer Benjamin Moser (Sontag): “We spent 2 hours talking to Pulitzer Prize Winner & gentleman philologist Benjamin 'Ben' Moser about translation, being hot, the Canon, writing, Adidas and much much more.”

The New York Times’s Ben Smith weighs in on “why we’re freaking out about Substack.” “Substack has captivated an anxious industry because it embodies larger forces and contradictions,” he writes. “For one, the new media economy promises both to make some writers rich and to turn others into the content-creation

The new class of Guggenheim Fellows has been announced: Don Mee Choi and Craig Morgan Teicher received fellowships in poetry; Kaitlin Greenidge and Laura van den Berg in fiction; Robyn Creswell in literary criticism; Alexander Chee and Kate Zambreno in general nonfiction. The full list is here.

The PEN America Literary Awards were announced in a virtual ceremony last night. Among the winners: Ross Gay for Be Holding, Kawai Strong Washburn for Sharks in the Time of Saviors, Barbara Ehrenreich for Had I Known, and Saidiya Hartman for Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments.

The Women’s Prize for

On the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast, co-hosted by Whitney Terrell and V. V. Ganeshananthan, writers Gish Jen and Peter Ho Davies talk about violence targeting Asian Americans, representation in pop culture and literature, and potential ways to move forward. Remembering the genesis of her 1991 novel Typical American, Jen talks about the pushback she had to overcome: “Not only did I write a novel, I wrote a novel that claimed full Americanness for Asian Americans. The first line is: ‘It’s an American story.’ I cannot tell you how much flak I got for that. ‘What do you mean, it’s American story?’

At Jacobin, author and former bank robber Nico Walker talks with Alex Press about his time as a medic in Iraq, his novel Cherry, and what he read while in prison: “The selection at Youngstown jail was not great; it was a lot of Louis L’Amour books and thrillers, which I didn’t really enjoy. But I chanced into a copy of The Idiot and saw how he balances a farce and a tragedy at the same time, and does these amazingly well-executed scenes where someone is showing their ass. The guy writes social awkwardness so well.”

In the Washington Post, the story of how journalists from the Baltimore Sun

In their acceptance speech for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, Jo Livingstone writes about the value of criticism in accursed times: “The upside to living, or at least writing, in a constant state of ‘emergency’ is that we begin to feel that the time for talking may be running out, and so we start to say what we mean a little more.”

At Vulture, Christian Lorentzen remembers Giancarlo DiTrapano: “He had hustle, and he had integrity. He followed his very rigorous tastes and never compromised. It would never occur to him to do so. When all

Giancarlo DiTrapano, the mastermind behind the New York Tyrant literary magazine and Tyrant Books, passed away last week at age forty-seven. A singular, generous, adventurous, and beloved editor, he published work by Gary Lutz, Megan Boyle, Atticus Lish, and many others.

For The Guardian, novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of the The Sympathizer and The Committed, has written an essay on the history of violence against Asian Americans in real life and popular culture. “The systemic violence of a US foreign policy designed to kill Asians in large numbers, or threaten to kill them, from the

The New Republic Union has announced that after discussions between management and Guild members, “no employee currently working in New York City will be asked to relocate and no one will lose their jobs relating to the company’s decision to increase its footprint in D.C.”

Rita Bullwinkel, author of the short story collection Belly Up, has created a “sound library” called Oral Florist, which collects recordings of artists and writers reading everyday texts out loud: Christine Schutt reads from The New England Cookbook; Deb Olin Unferth reads two certificates affixed to her refrigerator; Vi

For Literary Hub, Elisa Sotgiu outlines why some scholars believe that Elena Ferrante is the pseudonym of Domenico Starnone, a novelist from Naples who is married to translator Anita Raja (who is also a subject of speculation by readers and scholars.)

At The Guardian, Moira Donegan writes about reporter Felicia Sonmez’s since-overturned suspension from the Washington Post after sharing an article on Twitter about the sexual assault allegations against Kobe Bryant on the day of the basketball player’s death. On Sunday, Politico reported that Sonmez has long been prohibited from covering stories