Roxane Gay’s novel, An Untamed State, about a woman who is abducted in Haiti, is to be adapted for the screen by Fox Searchlight, and Gay has signed on to co-write the script.
After nearly ten years of offering his New York Times colleagues regular critiques of their writing and editing, Philip B. Corbett announces in his latest After Deadline post that there will be no more “for the time being.” So if we want to take note of the Times’s use of “sprung” for “sprang,” or its description of Donald Trump “grabbing his podium with both hands” (lectern would have been more accurate), we’ll have to do it alone.
In The Atlantic, Nicholas Dames has an essay on autofiction and the novel of “aloneness.” He writes that the blending of autobiography and the novel forms, once an effort to escape old debates about realism, is now focused “more explicitly on rejecting the goal of generating empathy, and the mission has become associated with two marquee names.” The two he goes on to discuss seem a surprising pair: Chris Kraus and Karl Ove Knausgaard. “Both of them,” Dames writes, “leave the exploration of multiple possible viewpoints behind. From a similar perch—that of the well-educated, if economically precarious, turn-of-the-millennium artist or intellectual—yet impelled by very different experiences, they start with the extremely personal (and sometimes deliberately perverse) in order to evoke the cold, impassable space between self and other.”
In London, the first Words by Women event took place this week, designed to compensate for the fact that so few women are nominated for the UK’s mainstream journalism awards. Meanwhile, the annual VIDA Count, which now looks at data on race, gender, sexuality, and disability, will be released next week.
Gawker CEO Nick Denton lays out evidence that he says will allow the company to overturn the Hulk Hogan decision (with its obliterating $140 million price tag) on appeal. And the editors of the New York Observer weigh in to offer Gawker some decidedly lukewarm solidarity: “This kind of tough case, in which an editor who resembles Ted Bundy in affect and empathy published a story designed to attract clicks through humiliating an aging C-lister, is exactly when we ought to be most protective of a site’s right to be obnoxious.”
