Franklin Foer and Leon Wieseltier are both leaving the New Republic, Foer to be replaced by Gabriel Snyder. (You can read the memos in question here.) Many have greeted the news as the end of an era; some gleefully (“Let the old guard die off,” more or less) and others with dismay. This morning, a rash of further resignations came: nine senior editors, the executive editor, the legal affairs editor, the digital media editor, the poetry editor, the dance editor, and fifteen contributing editors. The only senior editors not to have resigned are Evgeny Morozov, Rebecca Traister, and Brian Beutler. On Twitter, numerous people reported canceling their subscriptions. Ryan Lizza, who was the first contributing editor to leave, tweeted that owner Chris Hughes had called Wieseltier to stay on the masthead as “Literary Editor Emeritus”; Wieseltier declined. At New York Magazine, Jonathan Chait eulogizes the magazine and criticizes owner Hughes: ”Frank Foer isn’t leaving TNR because he wasn’t a good enough editor. He’s leaving because Chris Hughes is not a good enough owner.”
A previously unpublished novel by Ayn Rand, Ideal, will come out next summer.
On Twitter, Ayelet Waldman reacted badly to the fact that her book wasn’t on the New York Times Notable list.
Leslie Jamison’s year in reading included the poet Dorothea Lasky, Beautiful Children by Charles Bock, and two books by Maggie Nelson.
Ben Okri won the Bad Sex in Fiction award for this humid passage: “She became aware of places in her that could only have been concealed there by a god with a sense of humour. Adrift on warm currents, no longer of this world, she became aware of him gliding into her. He loved her with gentleness and strength, stroking her neck, praising her face with his hands, till she was broken up and began a low rhythmic wail. She was a little overwhelmed with being the adored focus of such power, as he rose and fell. She felt certain now that there was a heaven and that it was here, in her body. The universe was in her and with each movement it unfolded to her. Somewhere in the night a stray rocket went off.”