New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture has purchased a number of never-before-published writings by Malcolm X. Among the writings are three chapters from The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which were cut from the book after his assassination in 1965 because they were considered too controversial. In 1992, a biographer was allowed to look at the chapters for fifteen minutes, but aside from this they have been kept from the public. The poet and critic Kevin Young, the Schomburg’s director, says: “The Autobiography is one of the most important books of the twentieth century. To have the version with Malcolm X’s corrections, and to be able to see his thoughts taking shape, is incredibly powerful.”
Cathy Park Hong—the author of the poetry collection Dance Dance Revolution and the poetry editor at the New Republic—has announced that her collection of essays, Stand Up, will be published by One World/Random House in Spring 2020.
For the first time, the entire fifteen-year archive of The Believer is free online.
Judith Appelbaum—an editor at Publishers’ Weekly, a books columnist at the New York Times, and the author of the 1978 book How to Get Happily Published: A Complete and Candid Guide—has died. “It is largely within your power to determine whether a publisher will buy your work and whether the public will buy it once it’s released,” Appelbaum stated in the first chapter of her popular how-to guide for writers.
The FSG website has reprinted a recent conversation between Hilton Als and Caryl Phillips, who discuss Phillips’s new novel A View of the Empire at Sunset, which is about Wide Saragosa Sea author Jean Rhys’s return, in 1936, to her native Dominica. As Als notes early in the talk: “This is a tremendous undertaking in this book to not only imagine and re-imagine a writer whose work you love and love, but to really imagine aspects of colonial history that are fading but never go away.”
Amitava Kumar talks about what it was like to record the audio version of his new novel, Immigrant Montana.
