Carmen Giménez has been announced as the new executive director and publisher of Graywolf Press, succeeding Fiona McCrae. Giménez is the founder of the literary nonprofit Noemi Press and the author of the poetry collection Be Recorder, which Graywolf published in 2019. She will begin her new role on August 8.
For the Paris Review, Elisa Gabbert writes about fame, obscurity, and the appeal of “Why I Write” essays: “Some days I think the very question is banal, like photos of a writer’s ‘workspace.’ They’re all just desks! Why write? Why do anything? Why not write? It’s the same as the impulse to make a handprint in wet concrete or trace your finger in the mist on a window. What you wrote, as a kid, on a window was the simplest version of the vision.”
At the New York Times, a report on how book bans have turned into personal attacks on librarians. After talking to two dozen librarians and library associations, authors Elizabeth A. Harris and Alexandra Alter document some of the fallout, writing that librarians “have been labeled pedophiles on social media, called out by local politicians and reported to law enforcement officials. Some librarians have quit after being harassed online. Others have been fired for refusing to remove books from circulation.”
Tobias Carroll selects the best books in translation coming out this month for Words Without Borders.
Twitter is testing a new feature, CoTweets, which allows two accounts to collaborate on a tweet.
At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Jason DeYoung considers Shushan Avagyan’s new translation of Viktor Shklovsky’s 1925 On the Theory of Prose. The new edition updates and corrects Benjamin Sher’s 1990 translation, but DeYoung argues that “what makes Avagyan’s translation so authoritative is its effort to capture Shklovsky’s real voice, with its quirks, eccentricities, and lyrical patterns.”
