On the Guardian Books Podcast, Ben Lerner and Meena Kandasamy discuss autofiction and their recent books, The Topeka School and When I Hit You.
After another author won an award for a story that plagiarized her own, Laleh Khadivi reflects on ownership, inspiration, and storytelling.
Press Watch’s Dan Froomkin looks at the “implosion” of the New York Times’s political coverage last weekend. “Smart, capable Times reporters . . . put forth such epically, historically bad examples of pox-on-both-your-houses, boring-what-else-is-new, and self-contradictory political coverage that press critics on social media – including several former Times editors — were appropriately united in despair.”
Crazy Rich Asians director John M. Chu is producing a film version of Mary H. K. Choi’s Permanent Record.
Bustle Digital Group has launched Input, a consumer tech website.
At W Magazine, Andrea Whittle looks at Kendall Jenner’s transformation into “the patron saint” of alt lit. Paparazzi have caught Jenner reading works by Darcie Wilder, Miranda July, and was most recently seen reading Chelsea Hodson’s Tonight I’m Someone Else on a yacht in Miami during Art Basel. “Rarely has the power of ‘influence’ been felt so acutely in an industry in which a media blitz usually involves not much more than a handful of speaking events at local bookstores,” Whittle writes. “For the kinds of people who post Ben Lerner galleys on their Instagram stories to telegraph good taste, intelligence and access, Jenner’s paparazzi images created a sort of cognitive dissonance.”
