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For The Nation, Benjamin Kunkel considers Daniel Susskind’s Growth: A History and a Reckoning and Kohei Saito’s Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, and cites a recent Nature article stating that due to the effects of climate change, “the world economy is committed to an income reduction of 19% within the next 26 years independent of future emissions.” “The choice facing the 21st century, then, is likely not between degrowth and growth,” Kunkel writes. “It is more likely between a form of capitalist contraction in which prosperity endures for a few but evaporates for the rest of us, and some kind of socialist or communist degrowth in which the well-being of everyone in general prevails over the wealth of anyone in particular.”
In the new issue of n+1, Raven Leilani writes about losing both her father and brother the same year her debut novel was published, and about how “writing through or about grief is a confrontation with containment, both in the self and on the page.”
In his Substack, Lincoln Michel discusses literary fame and why some works last while others are eventually forgotten. (Michel references for example the American author Winston Churchill, who is little read today but was so popular in his day that the British politician of the same name published his writings as Winston S. Churchill to avoid confusion.) “I think what lasts is almost always what has a dedicated following among one or more of the following: artists, geeks, academics, critics, and editors.”
“About the world, the less said the better,” Shirley Hazzard wrote in a 1980 letter to Donald Keene. A selection of letters from a forthcoming collection of the writers’ correspondence is online now at the Paris Review.
The Cleveland Review of Books is opening fiction submissions on September 1: “We’re looking for prose fiction that meets the terms it sets for itself.” Full guidelines here.