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A new class of Guggenheim Fellows; Lauren Ro talks with the hosts of “Time to Say Goodbye” podcast

Don Mee Choi. Photo: Jay Weaver

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 Fiction has issued a statement condemning an openly transphobic letter circulated by the Wild Women Writing Club. Signatories of the letter claimed that the nomination of trans author Torrey Peters’s novel Detransition, Baby “feels like an insult.” Peters has received a wellspring of support from previous and current nominees of the prize and other writers. Fellow nominee Naoise Dolan stated that she is “incredibly proud to be on the longlist with [Detransition, Baby], and that letter is a transphobic disgrace.”

For Vulture, Lauren Ro interviews Jay Caspian Kang, E. Tammy Kim, and Andy B. Liu of Time To Say Goodbye. They started the podcast last April “as an outlet for discussing the coronavirus outbreak within an international context, and, more broadly, to talk about Asia, domestic and international leftist politics, and, of course, what it means to be Asian in America.” Kang mentions that the hosts would like to expand their discussion of international subjects: “The show would be boring to us if we just turned into an Asian American podcast about movies. We want to always have a broader perspective than that, one that’s rooted in our politics. I think the best way for us to do that is to talk about other struggles around the world that our listeners might not know about, where we ourselves are learning about something new.”

In the New Yorker, Giles Harvey reviews Cynthia Ozick’s new novel, Antiquities, and considers her five-and-a-half decades of publishing. In her most recent novels and critical essays, “Ozick has turned more and more to the past—in this case, the distant past—for inspiration, and away from a present she seems to consider hopelessly shallow.”

Hilary Leichter’s Temporary and Brandon Taylor’s Real Life are among this year’s New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award finalists.