Oprah Daily has the cover reveal for Brandon Taylor’s forthcoming novel The Late Americans, which will be published in May 2023 by Riverhead.
Elon Musk is reportedly moving forward in his bid to buy Twitter for $44 billion.
For the New York Times, poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib writes about country music star Loretta Lynn, who died this week at the age of ninety: “I found her to be one of the great romanticists because she was so committed to the rigors of loving herself that she suffered no one. She’d be quick to tell you what you weren’t gonna do on her watch.”
In the New Republic, Alex Shephard has written his annual, extremely exhaustive, article about who will win the Nobel Prize in Literature (announced tomorrow at about 7am eastern time). Going through various options from long-standing favorites like Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o to wildcards like Sally Rooney or Jonathan Franzen, Shephard looks at the betting odds and his own admittedly mixed track record. What if Karl Ove Knausgaard, currently listed at 33-1 odds, won? Shepherd writes, “This would be hilarious. It would cause a multiday meltdown on the internet and make Twitter more or less unusable—which is reason enough to support the choice.” A pretty good outcome, but there are downsides: “The only question is if the Academy would be too concerned that Knausgård would use the prize money to self-fund an 80,000-word dispatch about following Wilco around on its European tour—and, through extensive interviews with Jeff Tweedy and his son, interrogating his own history of bad parenting.” For The Atlantic, Shephard recommends five writers who probably won’t win the prize that you should read now.
Heather Clark, the author most recently of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, is under contract to write a new biography of poet Anne Sexton.
The editors of the feminist film journal Another Gaze have announced a publishing imprint that will focus on works of fiction and nonfiction by women filmmakers and film critics, as well as monographs of filmmakers and films. The first titles from Another Gaze Editions will include a new English-language edition of a book of writings by and interviews with Marguerite Duras, and a new translation of Lorenza Mazzetti’s debut novel, The Sky Is Falling.
