In response to anti-gay laws recently passed in Nigeria and Uganda, Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina, author of books such as One Day I Will Write About This Place and editor of the Nairobi-based journal Kwani, has revealed that he is gay.
Triple Canopy has announced the lineup for its third annual marathon reading of Gertrude Stein’s novel The Making of Americans. The event will start this Friday at 5pm and conclude sometime Sunday night, and readers will include Amy Sillman, Lynne Tillman, Charles Bernstein, and many others. If you can’t make it to Triple Canopy’s Brooklyn space, you can tune in to the livestream here.
An illuminating film about the late internet activist Aaron Swartz premiered at Sundance this week. At the New Yorker, Tim Wu considers what makes The Internet’s Own Boy, by Brian Knappenberger, so revealing: “The film confirms what everyone has said about Swartz,” writes Wu, “that he was difficult, foolish, and self-important in a way that is particular to smart young men, and that he was smart, idealistic, and vulnerable.”
Library Journal suggests a dozen books we should read this spring.
For the first time in twenty years, the venerable Oxford English Dictionary has a new editor. Read what he has to say about his neo-Victorian enterprise here.
Speaking of Gertrude Stein, a new translation of an old novel by Hassan Najmi considers the lives of Stein and her partner, Alice B. Toklas, from a Moroccan perspective, upending some of the myths of Tangiers (think Paul Bowles and William S. Burroughs) along the way.