The first issue of Astra magazine, edited by Nadja Spiegelman, will be published in April. In the meantime, the publication has posted its first cover, showing a contributor lineup including Ottessa Moshfegh, Kate Zambreno, Ada Limón, and more.
Amazon has announced that it will be closing all of its brick-and-mortar bookstores in the US and UK.
Author and preservationist Robert Hicks has died at the age of seventy-one. Hicks was the author of the bestseller The Widow of the South, among other novels, and raised money to buy and preserve a historic battlefield. An avid antique and art collector, Hicks lived in a Nashville suburb in a home that he named Labor in Vain.
Tomorrow at 2pm Eastern time, PEN will be hosting a Zoom event, “Voices of Ukraine: Readings in Support of Ukraine,” featuring US writers and Ukrainian authors reading their work. Participants include Paul Auster, Siri Hustvedt, Jennifer Haigh, Richard Ford, Ha Jin, Serhiy Zhadan, Victoria Amelina, Halyna Kruk, and Ostap Slyvynsky.
In the new issue of The Baffler, Wen Stephenson writes about Dostoyevsky, religious faith, and his parents, who both died during the pandemic.
AWP, the conference and book fair, is being held in Philadelphia from March 23 to March 26. This year’s programming includes panels on writing about disasters, using folklore in personal writing, the Occupy movement, a discussion on narrative craft between Brandon Taylor and Melissa Febos, and more. Poet Toi Derricotte will give a keynote address on March 24 at 8:30pm EST.
