paper trail

Jamaica Kincaid to receive the Hadada award; George Saunders is starting a Substack

Jamaica Kincaid. Photo: Sofie Sigrinn.

Jamaica Kincaid is this year’s recipient of the Hadada Prize from the Paris Review. The journal’s publisher Mona Simpson said: “I can’t think of another writer whose voice contains such intensities of rage and love.” The lifetime achievement award will be given at the Paris Review’s Spring Revel, which will take place in person in April.

In a new episode of On the Nose, the Jewish Currents podcast, Ari Brostoff hosts a discussion between Kay Gabriel and Vicky Osterweil about Let the Record Show, Sarah Schulman’s newest book. Osterweil wrote a review for Jewish Currents that was appreciative of Shulman’s history but also critical, and Gabriel wrote a letter defending Schulman in response. On the podcast, the two try to move the discussion beyond the ensuing controversy and discuss larger issues of queer history, activism, and trans representaion.

In his “Graphic Content” column for the New York Times, Ed Park considers the work of the “stuntman-philosopher of American comics,” Matt Madden: “The hilarity mounts, but so does the mystery of what makes a story. In flaunting style over substance, he shows them to be one and the same.”

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois is the latest pick in Oprah’s book club.

At the New Statesman, Leo Robson talks with George Saunders about writing and Saunders’s new Substack newsletter, Story Club. The newsletter promises to offer plenty of insight into craft, a subject Saunders explored in his newest book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain and at Syracuse University, where he’s taught writing since the 1990s. In the first edition, Saunders writes, “Increasingly, creative writing is understood to be a sort of adorable, niche venture, relegated, mostly to MFA programs. But, in my view, this underestimates the essential importance of storytelling to a culture.”