Joshua Benton selects notable clips from the archives of Editor & Publisher, the self-described “bible of the newspaper industry.” The Internet Archive has digitized nearly every back issue in their catalog, starting from 1901.
At The Believer, Ahmed Naji chronicles his time reading and writing in an Egyptian prison, where he was sentenced to two years over obscenity charges against his novel Using Life. Naji’s fellow prisoners taught him to “rethink much of what I knew” about literature, and what readers want. One man, “a judge accused of taking a four-million-dollar bribe” told Naji that Dostoyevsky’s The Eternal Husband was “hilarious.” Naji describes being “taken about by the idea that Dostoyevsky might be funny, because everything I’d read or heard about him said he was a master of psychology and of the complex character, and a chronicler of the misery of Russian feudalism.”
LeVar Burton, actor and the longtime host of PBS’s Reading Rainbow, has been named the first PEN/Faulkner Literary Champion.
Rachel Poser profiles Dan-el Padilla Peralta, a professor of classics at Princeton, for the New York Times Magazine. Looking at how Greek and Roman emblems and slogans were used by rioters at the Capitol, Padilla stresses that the field needs to separate itself from white supremacy. “Systemic racism is foundational to those institutions that incubate classics and classics as a field itself,” Padilla told Poser. “Can you take stock, can you practice the recognition of the manifold ways in which racism is a part of what you do? What the demands of the current political moment mean?”
At NPR, Brandon Hobson, author of Where the Dead Sit Talking, discusses his new novel, The Removed, and the continual state violence against Cherokee people: “Chekhov says fiction should begin by asking questions, and that's where I start is, what is justice? And what is healing? And how do we heal? And the answer is that maybe there's not a resolution.”
LitHub has posted Sheila Heti’s introduction to the New York Review Books’s edition of Richard Wolheim’s Germs, which Heti calls a “sensuous and melancholic memoir.” Wolheim, who died in 2003, was a philosopher, editor, and essayist specializing in art and psychoanalysis. As Heti writes, “Germs is concerned with the conditions of growth. It is easy for people to sentimentalize childhood as a sunny place, but for Wollheim—romantic but not sentimental—the world’s rare joys were contrasted by an atmosphere that was gray, cloudy, and solitary.”
