Daniel Menaker, author and longtime editor for the New Yorker and Random House, passed away Monday at age seventy-nine. Over the years, he worked with Pauline Kael, Salman Rushdie, Alice Munro, V. S. Pritchett, and the formerly anonymous author of Primary Colors, a roman à clef of Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign. Menaker’s final work, a recently completed book of poems about having cancer during the pandemic titled Terminalia, will be published and distributed this fall by Portal Press and n+1.
The twenty-second annual Southern Music issue of Oxford American is available for preorder and guest edited by singer-songwriter Brittany Howard.
“Nabokov and I are hardly a match made in heaven,” writes Patricia Lockwood, in a review of his essays, letters, and other writings for the London Review of Books. “Still I revisit him.” In addition to the collected writings, Lockwood considers Pale Fire, Bend Sinister, Lolita, and Nabokov’s habit of setting up “problems to which it seems there should be answers, but he does not give answers, he gives rewards. That is why he is beloved, why people dedicate whole academic lives to him.”
At The Nation, Francis Wade interviews Paul Gilroy—author of There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack and Against Race, among other books—about Englishness, nationalism, and the vernacular of neoliberalism. “If my work says anything useful about Britain,” Gilroy said, “it’s in insisting that there is a close relationship between nationalism and racism. They couldn’t really be separated out and allocated to different disciplines of research.”
PERIPLUS, a mentorship collective for BIPOC writers, is accepting applications for their 2021 inaugural class.
Tomorrow night, City Lights books will hold a virtual event for the Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman, featuring video presentations by poets, artists, and musicians.
