The Booker Prize longlist of thirteen writers has been announced. The shortlist will be released on September 6, with the final award given on October 17.
Barack Obama has tweeted his summer reading list. The former president has been reading Jennifer Egan, Emily St. John Mandel, Ezra Klein, Hanif Abdurraqib, and more.
At the Los Angeles Times, Sam Dean interviews historian and activist Mike Davis about his life and career. Davis, the author of more than a dozen books, has terminal esophageal cancer. He told Dean, “I’m just extraordinarily furious and angry. If I have a regret, it’s not dying in battle or at a barricade as I’ve always romantically imagined—you know, fighting.”
The New York Times has announced that Madison Malone Kircher and Joe Bernstein are joining the Style section.
Jon Raymond shares his ”small personal canon” of sci-fi books, including titles by Ursula K. Le Guin, Charles Yu, and Cormac McCarthy. Raymond’s new sci-fi novel, Denial, will be published today. Raymond admits, “I wrote a sci-fi book, and yet I don’t really love science fiction.”
Merve Emre considers her “Ideal Writer,” Australian author Gerald Murnane. Emre writes, “The act of contemplation is rendered in a compact and highly finished style that distinguishes Murnane both from his predecessor Proust and from his contemporaries W. G. Sebald, J. M. Coetzee, Jon Fosse, and Rachel Cusk.”
