A school district in Tennessee has voted to ban Art Speigelman’s Pulitzer-winning graphic novel, Maus, which depicts the Holocaust in a story about the author’s relationship with his father. The board took issue with a handful of curse words in the book and an image of a nude woman. Speigelman has called this focus “myopic” and told CNN that the decision “has the breath of autocracy and fascism about it.” 

Clio Chang and Katie McDonough are moving to New York magazine’s Curbed. Chang, most recently a freelance writer, will cover “New York City’s built environment and the people and forces that

New Yorker writer Hua Hsu has announced a new memoir coming out in September called Stay True. 

This week, journalists throughout Mexico are holding vigils and protests, as three media workers have been killed this month. The Committee to Protect Journalists has said that Mexico is one of the most dangerous countries for reporters. At a vigil in Mexico City,  Oscar Luna said of the murders, “It’s infuriating, it’s enraging, because journalists always give our soul, our heart, our body. From one moment to the next, they take away that passion, that commitment, that love, that dedication.”   

PEN America has announced the finalists for its 2022 literary awards. Among the finalists are Percival Everett (The Trees), Joy Williams (Harrow), Elissa Washuta (White Magic), Torrey Peters (Detransition, Baby), and Hanif Abdurraqib (A Little Devil in America). 

Tomorrow at 7pm Eastern time, n+1 will host Ari Brostoff for a discussion of their debut essay collection, Missing Time, with novelist Alexandra Kleeman and n+1 editors Dayna Tortorici and Mark Krotov. Brostoff’s collection includes essays on The X-Files, Philip Roth, Vivian Gornick, and more. You can read an excerpt from the book’s

Joshua Rothman profiles sci-fi author Kim Stanley Robinson. In novels like New York 2140, The Ministry for the Future, and the books of the Mars trilogy, Robinson imagines dystopian worlds with utopian-like solutions. Rothman observes, “Robinson learned to write credible utopian fiction in part through a fractal sort of thinking, connecting the personal to the planetary.”  

Colm Tóibín has been named the Laureate for Irish Fiction by the nation’s Arts Council. Tóibín said of the award, “I will do what I can to work with a community of readers so that fiction continues to enrich our lives,

At Vulture, Matt Zoller Seitz has written a wonderful tribute to critic Terry Teachout, whose books include biographies of George Balanchine, H. L. Mencken, and Duke Ellington. “Terry believed you could find good art almost anywhere, and that you would be more likely to believe this if more big-city journalists would make a commitment to leave their regional comfort zones and seek it out,” Seitz writes. “In my conversations with him, he sometimes referred to this philosophy as ‘truffle-hunting,’ because ‘you’re not going to experience a lot of the good stuff if you wait for a PR person to tell

For Vanity Fair, Lucy Sante writes about her transition: “The beautiful image I sometimes see in the mirror is immediately undone if I try to take a picture. But I am much happier than I can remember being, more centered, many many times more social. A few years before my transition, I had undertaken to sell my papers to the New York Public Library and realized, dimly, that I was preparing for death. Now I want to put off the final curtain for as long as possible.” 

The National Book Critics Circle announced the finalists for its 2021 awards last night. Thirty finalists in six categories will

Artist Richard Kraft has started a podcast, Acts & Facts, that features conversations with artists, writers, scientists, and more about the books that have shaped them. Guests include Albert Mobilio, Marjorie Perloff, Lisa Pearson, and others.  

The Millions has posted its list of the most-anticipated books of the first half of 2022 and writers to watch for spring 2022. 

For their monthly “Covering Climate Now” column, Columbia Journalism Review talks with Monica Samayoa, a climate reporter and a member of the Uproot Project’s steering committee. Uproot is a network for journalists of color

André Leon Talley, the legendary fashion editor and stylist, has died at the age of seventy-three. He worked at Interview under Andy Warhol, as the chief of the Women’s Wear Daily’s Paris bureau, and was the creative director and editor at large of Anna Wintour’s Vogue. In a 1994 New Yorker profile, Hilton Als wrote: “Talley’s fascination stems, in part, from his being the only one. In the media or the arts, the only one is usually male, always somewhat ‘colored,’ and almost always gay.” His memoir, The Chiffon Trenches, was published in 2020. 

The A.V. Club’s staff have been “invited” by

The New York Magazine Union has reached an agreement with management after more than two years of negotiation.

At The Nation, Sam Huber interviews Nobel-winning poet Louise Glück about her new book, Winter Recipes for the Collective, her relationship with John Ashbery’s work, and what teaching means to her: “When I started teaching, I started writing again after the first very long period of silence that I’d ever had. And so I associated teaching with the restoration of speech.”

The playwright Lorraine Hansberry “achieved literary celebrity but called herself a ‘literary failure,’ was supported

For the New York Times, Amanda Hess writes about several recent novels and films—from Claire Vaye Watkins’s I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness to Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter—in which mothers leave their children. “Lately the vanishing mother has provoked a fresh response: respect.” In these narratives, “children are not abandoned outright,” and work outside of the home is sometimes implausibly regarded as “the ultimate escape.” Hess concludes: “Even as these stories work to uncover motherhood’s complex emotional truths, they indulge their own little fiction: that a mother only becomes

The New York magazine union reached a deal with management yesterday after two and a half years of negotiations.

Olivia Nuzzi, New York’s Washington correspondent, is developing a satirical drama for TV. Deadline reports that the series will follow “a young reporter in DC who defects from the mainstream media” and star Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh.

For the New Yorker, Casey Cep writes about Tema Stauffer’s photo series “Southern Fiction.” Stauffer’s subjects include William Faulkner’s kitchen, the street where Richard Wright grew up, and Eudora Welty’s library. But as Cep writes, “Stauffer’s

The 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellows have been named. This year, the grantees are all prose writers, including Melissa Febos, Tope Folarin, Kelli Jo Ford, Shruti Swamy, Grace Talusan, and more.

At Vulture, Andrea Long Chu reviews Hanya Yanagihara’s new novel To Paradise. Chu argues that Yanagihara remains at heart a travel writer, and that “her work betrays a touristic kind of love for gay men. By exaggerating their vulnerability to humiliation and physical attack, she justifies a maternal posture of excessive protectiveness. This is not an act of dehumanization