paper trail

Announcing the 2022 Guggenheim Fellows; Erin Somers notes a resurgence in the use of the term “Künstlerroman”

Hernan Diaz. Photo: Pascal Perich

The new class of Guggenheim Fellows has been announced. The 2022 fellows in fiction and nonfiction include Jennifer Croft, Alexandra Kleeman, Hernan Diaz, Brandon Hobson, Maaza Mengiste, Christopher Sorrentino, and Melissa Febos, among others. 

At Gawker, Erin Somers notes an uptick in critics’ use of the German term “Künstlerroman.” Somers first noticed the word in Hermione Hoby’s Bookforum review of Sean Thor Conroe’s novel Fuccboi, and has since endeavored to find the source of what seems to be a trend. According to Somers, that credit goes to Sam Lipsyte, who reminded her never to omit the umlaut. 

In “Journalism’s Twitter Problem Is the Journalists,” Choire Sicha considers a recent memo by New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet that advised reporters to not rely on Twitter so much. Sicha writes, “Most of the people who work for [Baquet] are very bad at being on Twitter, and their tweets truly are just not good. And then their bosses are so obsessed with Twitter too, and on edge about it. A cycle of humiliation ensues.” 

For the Paris Review Daily, Maya Binyam writes about the first time she read Jamaica Kincaid and the influence Kincaid has had on her work: “I felt emboldened by her wild, inimitable sentences—an invitation to abandon some of the conventions I had learned in school (which no doubt made my own early attempts at creative writing hard to tolerate).”

On Monday, April 25, David Kurnick will discuss his new book on Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives with Nicholás Medina Mora, Natasha Wimmer, and Angelo Hernandez-Sias. You can read an excerpt from Kurnick’s The Savage Detectives Reread here

Applications for the National Book Critics Circle’s Emerging Critics Fellowship are open today through May 6. The one-year fellowship will receive mentorship from NBCC board members, admission to the organization’s events, and craft lectures via Zoom.