Gallery Books, a Simon & Schuster imprint, has announced that it will publish Hunter Biden’s memoir, Beautiful Things, in April. The book was written with Drew Jubera, and according to the publisher, as Alexandra Alter reports, “will be more of a personal narrative about addiction and recovery than a political memoir.”
At Columbia Journalism Review, Jon Allsop recounts how Indian authorities have cracked down on social media and individual members of the media amid the farmers’ protests. Last Tuesday, Navreet Singh, a twenty-five-year-old farmer, was killed during a protest. The official line goes that his cause of death was a tractor accident, but photographic evidence supports witnesses’ claims that Singh was shot in the head by a police officer. Indian officials have filed sedition charges against nine journalists “who reported on, or merely tweeted about, Singh’s death and the protests.” This week, the Modi government blocked internet access in Delhi, following Twitter’s refusal to take down accounts critical of the state.
Ben Lerner considers Erica Hunt’s new poetry collection, Jump the Clock in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books. Hunt’s work has contributed to the anticapitalist aims of the Language poets even as she remains skeptical, in Lerner’s words, of the “avant-garde fantasy that writing difficult poetry constitutes meaningful political action.” Lerner concludes by noting that there’s much more to say about Hunt’s project than he has: “She is a genuinely experimental writer whose work cannot be captured by the old but still influential vanguard futurisms that, under the sign of making it new, are so often conservative: reinscribing a distinction between form and content, conserving the normativity of whiteness.”
Sarah Jaffe joins the hosts of the Art and Labor podcast—O.K. Fox, Lucia Love, Darcie Wilder, and Sarah Crowe—to talk about her latest book, Work Won’t Love You Back.
The Paris Review has asked contributors what they’ve been reading and watching this winter. A small sampling: David Adjmi has rewatched Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt for “maybe the twentieth time”; Alicia Wright recommends Uche Nduka’s poetry collection Facing You for evocative language that can meet even “weary attention”; Natalie Shapero has been spending “some strange hours” watching Bud Greenspan’s documentaries of the Olympics.
Kathleen Belew’s next book, Home, at the End of the World, has been sold to Random House. Home will examine “our era of apocalypse through a history centered on [Belew’s] native Colorado.”
