For The Atlantic, Danzy Senna writes about Courtney E. Martin’s memoir Learning in Public: Lessons for a Racially Divided America From My Daughter’s School and Robin DiAngelo’s Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm, taking the two books as emblematic of a new genre, what she terms “anti-racist self-help.” Senna notices that both books are intent on demonstrating the goodness and effortful striving of their authors: “The word brave gets used a lot in Martin’s book, and the idea of bravery gets performed a lot in DiAngelo’s book, as she time and again steps in as savior to her Black friends, who apparently need a bold white person to take over the wearisome task of educating unselfaware, well-meaning white people.”
For the London Review of Books, Patricia Lockwood writes about Marian Engel’s 1976 novel Bear, which is about a librarian’s love affair with the animal. As Lockwood writes, “Sex starts on page 107, though love begins on page 77. How does this first impossible encounter happen? Starved of company, Lou lures the animal inside.”
Daniel Strauss, a senior political reporter for The Guardian, is leaving the paper to join the New Republic. Timothy Noah, author of The Great Divergence, will also be joining the staff.
Post45 Contemporaries has announced that it is doing a series on writer and musician David Berman that will be published early next year. Its last series or “cluster” was on poet Bernnadette Mayer. Berman died in 2019; in a remembrance for Bookforum, Christian Lorentzen wrote, “The landscape of Berman’s America is the one we know from our national myths, but it’s littered with debris of a distinct late-twentieth-century vintage: infrared deer, digital snakes, trousers held up by extension cords, duct-tape shoes, mustaches caked with airplane glue.”
In the New Criterion, Adam Kirsch writes about the late Irish literary critic Denis Donoghue, who died in April.
