Author Salman Rushdie was attacked this morning in western New York, where he was about to give a lecture, the Associated Press reports. Rushdie’s 1988 novel The Satanic Verses is banned in Iran, and the country’s late leader issued a fatwa calling for his death in 1989. AP’s Joshua Goodman writes that “​​Iran’s government has long since distanced itself from Khomeini’s decree, but anti-Rushdie sentiment lingered. In 2012, a semi-official Iranian religious foundation raised the bounty for Rushdie from $2.8 million to $3.3 million.”

Online at n+1, Jenny Brown, the author of Birth Strike, writes

The Paris Review Daily is bringing back their “Culture Diary” column. Today, the site posted a dispatch from Los Angeles by Maya Binyam. Of Elif Batuman’s new novel, Binyam writes, “Almost every review I’ve read of Either/Or mentions Selin’s naive and enthusiastic embrace of great works of literature, which she reads as instruction manuals for how to construct a life; none mentions her stated difficulty in appreciating hip-hop, which she summarizes as an altogether alienating genre of music defined by a man ‘saying “Uh, uh” in the background.’”

For The Guardian, Janina Ramirez lists ten books

At the Paris Review, read Annalena Benini’s interview with the Italian poet Patrizia Cavalli, who died in June. They discuss Cavalli’s friendship with Elsa Morante, her affinity for domestic objects, and Cavalli’s first poems, which she wrote after seeing Kim Novak in the 1955 film Picnic: “I fell in love, went home, fasted for a week in protest because I’d never be able to know Kim Novak—and after the fast I wrote two poems. I found them recently while going through some old notebooks. One is titled ‘If Kim Novak were to die.’” 

Katy Waldman reviews Emi Yagi’s Diary of a Void for the New

Hulu has optioned Sheila Heti’s forthcoming novel, Alphabetical Diaries. For the novel, Heti took a decade’s worth of diaries, placed each sentence in alphabetical order (based on the first word of the sentence), and then cut until a narrative took shape. The book will be released by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2023. Hulu hopes to turn the novel into a TV series. 

The New York Times profiles poet Carmen Giménez, who starts her role as the publisher and executive director of Graywolf Press today. Giménez remembers looking at poetry chapbooks and zines at a bookstore in the late ’90s: “As a

At the New Yorker, Joy Williams looks at the photographs of Curran Hatleberg, which were taken mostly in northern Florida: “The atmosphere is weary, post-consumerish. No one seems to possess anything. The men and boys are often shirtless, the cars cannibalized. There is beer, and there are bees bearding the faces of men; there is a peeling painted sign offering honey, but there is no honey.”

Post45 Contemporaries has collected a series of appreciations for historian and activist Mike Davis’s work, with contributions by Madeline Lane-McKinley, Ryan Cecil Jobson, Eric Avila, and Megan Tusler.

Writer and editor John H. Maher has been live tweeting the antitrust trial that will determine whether Penguin Random House will be allowed to acquire Simon & Schuster. Today was day four of a trial that two days ago featured Stephen King testifying for the government’s case. The Los Angeles Times rounds up what you need to know about the proposed merger.  

In her New York Times “By the Book” interview, Lynne Tillman discusses Jane Bowles’s Two Serious Ladies (1943), noting “it was her only novel, and for that she’s not taught. Her stories are brilliant also. I’m glad I don’t know exactly

Pulitzer Prize–winning author Heather Ann Thompson is in the midst of a lawsuit to keep New York prisons from banning her book on the 1971 Attica prison revolt. The state attorney general’s office has proposed dismissing the suit, as prison officials have decided to lift the ban under the condition that two pages of Blood in the Water, which display a map of the prison, will be excised before reaching incarcerated readers. Thompson has noted that censorship at Attica by correctional officers was one of the factors that sparked the 1971 uprising.  

Stephen King has testified in the antitrust

At Lit Hub, an excerpt from Michelle Tea’s Knocking Myself Up: A Memoir of My (In)Fertility, which was just published by Dey Street Books. Tea writes, “Although my friends’ anti-baby fears gave me the opportunity to try out my pro-baby arguments, the truth was, the dare to depart in this wild new direction existed inside my body alongside self-doubt, the economic scarcity issues that were my birthright, and basic terror of the unknown.” 

At The Baffler, Rhian Sasseen considers the late Japanese sci-fi writer Izumi Suzuki, whose stories appear for the first time in English in the recent collection

Thomas Nelson Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Christian publishing, is releasing a new memoir by US Senator Tim Scott, America, a Redemption Story, on August 9. The copyright page states that the South Carolina Republican is preparing a presidential bid for the 2024 election. The publisher is now saying that Scott did not sign off on this declaration, and that printing it was a mistake. “The description on the copyright page was our error and is not accurate. It was not done at the direction or approval of the Senator or his team. We are working to correct this immediately,” a spokesperson

Gilbert Cruz, the Culture editor of the New York Times, will be the paper’s next Books editor, succeeding Pamela Paul. In a press release, the Times announced that Cruz will work to “reimagine The New York Times Book Review, the nation’s last stand-alone newspaper book-review section, for the digital age.” 

Art in America’s second annual Summer Reading issue is out now, with Jackson Arn on artist biographies, Hannah Stamler on children’s books by artists, Lucy Ives on indie presses and self-publishing projects, and more. 

Lincoln Michel has started a Twitter thread of resources for the business

The Robert B. Silvers Foundation has announced the recipients of its 2022 grants. The winners include Hannah Zeavin, Christian Lorentzen, Damion Searls, Stephen F. Kearse, and Urmila Seshagiri, among others.

For the Verso Books blog, Francesca Peacock writes about the politics of Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg: “Given Ginzburg’s life-long saturation in left-wing politics, why is it now so easy to read her fiction entirely divorced from this context? Part of the reason lies with Ginzburg herself: in her writing, she was unfailingly self-deprecating about her own political knowledge.” For more

Yale has announced the finalists of this year’s Frederick Douglass Book Prize, which recognizes outstanding books “on slavery, resistance, and/or abolition.” The finalists are Tiya Miles’s All That She Carried, Jennifer L. Morgan’s Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic, and Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh’s The Souls of Womenfolk. 

For the New Republic, Scott Bradfield writes about Frank O’Hara’s circle and the joyous nonchalance of his poetry, and considers Ada Calhoun’s Also a Poet. Calhoun’s new book is part biography and part memoir, and is about O’Hara