On the New Yorker’s Page Turner blog, Jane Hu writes about Hilary Mantel’s double vision. Hu describes Mantel’s health issues and the way that these infirmities fed her writing process: “Writing enabled Mantel to locate herself in a body that felt increasingly alien. In the face of confusion and loss, she began to tell stories.”
In Gawker, a breakdown of how the new global news site Semafor is breaking down the news.
Sophie Haigney interviews Nancy Lemann for the Paris Review. Describing her first novel, The Lives of the Saints, Lemann says, “It took three months to write it and seven years to get it published because it’s much harder for a certain kind of person to deal with business than it is to write a book It’s the easiest thing to sit alone in your room and write, but what’s hard is trying to sell yourself.”
Hua Hsu and Namwali Serpell will read from their new books, Stay True and The Furrows, tonight at a hybrid online/in-person event hosted by the 92nd Street Y. Prior to the event, you can read Sarah Jaffe’s interview with Serpell in the current issue of Bookforum; online this week at Bon Appetit, Hua Hsu sings the praises of his waffle-maker (“owning this ridiculous thing provided a great excuse for having people over”).
The new issue of The Point magazine is online now, with essays and reviews by Elisa Gonzalez, Sam Kriss, Jess Bergman, and more.
In the New York Times, John Jerimiah Sullivan writes about Cormac McCarthy’s new novel and the paradoxical word portentous: “Applied to prose, it can mean that a writer has attained a genuinely prophetic, doom-laden gravitas, or that the writing goes after those very qualities and doesn’t get there, winding up pretentious. McCarthy has always been willing to balance on this fence.”
