In a staff memo obtained by Variety, Bustle founder and CEO Bryan Goldberg announced plans to relaunch Gawker in 2019. Amanda Hale, formerly The Outline’s chief revenue officer, has been hired as publisher. “We won’t recreate Gawker exactly as it was,” Goldberg explained in his memo, “but we will build upon Gawker’s legacy and triumphs — and learn from its missteps.”
The Whiting Foundation is looking for submissions for its 2018 Whiting Literary Magazine Prize. The award, received last year by A Public Space, Fence, and Words Without Borders, offers grant money to outstanding literary magazines over three years.
At Artforum, Melissa Anderson, Vivian Gornick, J. Hoberman and more remember the Village Voice.
At the New Republic, Daphne Merkin reviews Björn Runge’s new movie, The Wife, based on a novel by Meg Wolitzer. “The Wife is that increasingly rare offering, a commercially viable film that also makes you rethink your assumptions about talent and who gets to wield it,” she writes. “It begins as a portrait of a seemingly conventional marriage, its comforts and compromises, and gradually builds to a portrait of one woman’s radical journey to self-definition. “
Lit Hub asks Katya Apekina, Esi Edugyan, Ben Fountain, Lydia Kiesling, and Olivia Laing about their literary influences, writing life, and more in their Author Questionnaire. Kiesling describes her life while writing The Golden State as “mired in toddler shit” and “mad about work and parental leave.” Fountain says that if he weren’t a writer he would like to be “a really good (and reasonably successful) jazz pianist. Apekina takes issue with critics who claim her novel is too dark. “The things I write are slippery and not easily categorizable, and maybe I enjoy making people a little bit uncomfortable,” she says. “I think discomfort is important.”