Robert Silvers, the editor of the New York Review of Books, died this morning at the age of eighty-seven. Silvers was a founding editor of the Review and had been its sole editor since the death of the magazine’s cofounder, Barbara Epstein, in 2006. The tributes began pouring in on Twitter almost immediately, despite the fact that Silvers tended to shy away from praise: Even as one of the most eminent and admired editors in the literary world, he avoided the spotlight. As he told an interviewer in 2008: “The editor is a middleman. The one thing he should avoid is taking credit. It’s the writer that counts.”
The Accusation, a novel written by a North Korean dissident who uses the pseudonym Bandi, was miraculously smuggled out of the country in 2013, and is now finding an international audience.
We’re excited to see the next installment of writer and filmmaker Stephen Elliott’s dark, strange, and timely web series Driven, in which Elliott plays an author who drives for a car service. In the first episode, his passengers include two Trump supporters and author Michael Cunningham. In later episodes, he gives a ride to a pot-smoking cop played by Lili Taylor, and a comic-book-store employee who goes to great lengths to steal his cat from his ex.
In his latest photography colum, novelist and critic Teju Cole studies Danny Lyon’s The Cotton Pickers, which was taken in the late 1960s, writing, “I love and hate it at the same time.”