In a Twitter thread, A.N. Devers looks at the erasure of former Paris Review editor Brigid Hughes from the history of the magazine. Hughes took over after founder George Plimpton died in 2003, and was let go in 2004. Devers points to New York Times articles about the magazine over the years—including a 2011 profile of Stein that erroneously refers to him as only the second editor after Plimpton—and notes that mentions of her work are regularly removed from the publication’s Wikipedia page. “One of the most amazing things about Brigid Hughes is that she then started her own magazine and continued to be who she was, an extraordinary editor who did the work with little fanfare,” Devers writes. “But we should still demand her first work be acknowledged.”
Finalists for the Albertine Prize have been announced. Nominees include Édouard Louis’s The End of Eddy, Anne Garréta’s Not One Day, and Mathias Énard’s Compass.
MSNBC has reversed its decision to allow journalist Sam Seder’s contract to expire without renewal.
The New York Times talks to Richard Lloyd Parry about Martin Amis, failing to finish Ulysses, and gendered literature. Parry says that he avoids the genres of “chick lit” and “lad lit” equally. “Anything that hitches itself too closely to a particular readership has failed a crucial test of literature,” he explained. “You’ve got to try to make a broad appeal, or at least not to exclude 50 percent of humanity.”
Sarah Seltzer explores the ways that scandals are used to overshadow the accomplishments of female authors. Comparing the outing of Elena Ferrante’s identity and the recent plagiarism lawsuit brought by an ex-boyfriend against Emma Cline, Seltzer writes that these incidents both show the ways in which writers’ personal lives are used to detract from their literary success. “Those twin intrusions . . . both attempted to permanently put asterisks on the discussion of these women’s writing,” she writes. “At least temporarily and at least for some readers, Cline is reduced to the ex-girlfriend of the guy suing her. Ferrante became the wife of another novelist.”
