Farrar, Straus and Giroux has announced its inaugural FSG Writer’s Fellowship, which proposes to support one emerging writer with $15,000 and mentorship in a yearlong program. Applications will open in April, and will be judged by Sheila Heti, Katie Kitamura, and Rowan Ricardo Phillips.
Following an investigation by a group of six historians, a Dutch publisher is pulling its book The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation from stores. Written by Rosemary Sullivan, the book identifies a Jewish notary named Arnold van den Bergh as the likely person who revealed the Frank family’s hiding place to Nazi occupiers. But upon reviewing the methodology within, the six historians found that the book “displays a distinct pattern in which assumptions are made by the CCT (Cold Case Team), held to be true a moment later, and then used as a building block for the next step in the train of logic.”
For the New York Times Magazine, Charley Locke writes a “Letter of Recommendation” column on commonplace books, which are journals for keeping quotes, poems, and lyrics close. Readers have kept commonplace books since the Renaissance, and Locke has kept hers for ten years. Among the quotes she has copied down about love, friendship, and writing, “there are also quotes about writing down lines you love.”
Kevin Dettmar reviews Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s film Drive My Car, which is based in part on a short story by Haruki Murakami, for the New Yorker. The film, which is elaborately subtitled to translate several spoken languages as well as Korean Sign Language, “immerses us in what the French literary theorist Roland Barthes called ‘the pleasure of the text,’ and the film proves to be a master class in one of his key concepts: intertextuality.”
On Wednesday, April 6 at 2pm Eastern time, the London Review Bookshop will host painter and author Celia Paul to discuss her forthcoming book, Letters to Gwen John, with Olivia Laing.