paper trail

A YA Retelling of Anna Karenina

Jenny Lee’s Anna K, the anticipated YA retelling of Anna Karenina set in present-day Manhattan (with a hint of Gossip Girl), will be published in early 2020, and will become a TV series shortly after that. Entertainment Weekly has an excerpt

Adam Mansbach has sold his book I Had a Brother Once, an “epic poem” about the suicide of the author’s brother, to One World, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Mansbach is the author of the novels Angry Black White Boy and The End of the Jews, but he is most famous for the mock children’s book Go the Fk to Sleep, which was released by Akashic in 2011 and sold more than a million copies. One World says that Brother is “an insightful meditation on the mysteries of grief, loss, mortality, and the inner lives of the people we love the most.”

The New York Times did not review Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick when it came out. In 1876, said of his poem Clarel: “It should have been written in prose.” A letter to the Book Review described what it was like to spend time with Melville: “Though a delightful talker when in the mood, he was abnormal, as most geniuses are, and had to be handled with care.” Tina Jordan has visited the archives and returned with a fascinating overview of the paper’s coverage of the American novelist. At the Guardian, Philip Hoare explains why Moby-Dick (“subversive, queer, and terrifying”) remains “the novel of our times.”

Gia Kourlas is the new dance critic at the New York Times.

The White Review has a new interview with the poet Ariana Reines, author of A Sand Book: “I have only very seldom cast spells. I have only once made a sigil. One time I made $300 go into my bank account. This kind of trickery isn’t where it’s really at for me. You can play around with the material world, and I tend to enjoy people who do, but if that’s what constitutes witchcraft, it holds no interest for me. What interests me is the subtle and wild way poetry produces more liberty in my life, the way it opens thought, feeling, past experience, and future desire to a much more quantum array of possibility.