Jonathan Franzen is editing the next edition of The Best American Essays. The contents haven’t been revealed yet, but rumor has it that Alexander Chee’s “Girl” is one of the selections.
The New York Times style section features a profile of the classics scholar Mary Beard, the author of SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (a finalist for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award) and Laughter in Ancient Rome. Laughter, it turns out, plays a significant role in the piece. A. A. Gill once said that Beard, who appears regularly on TV in the UK, was more fit for the British reality-TV show The Undateables. Discussing the incident at the recent Women in the World Summit, which was organized by Tina Brown, Beard, who originally responded to Gill in a column titled “Too Ugly for TV? No, I’m Too Brainy for Men Who Fear Clever Women,” noted: “It’s about having a laugh about it. A bit of outrage is good, but having your only rhetorical register as outrage is always going to be unsuccessful. You’ve got to vary it. Sometimes, some of the things that sexist men do just deserve to be laughed at.”
Elizabeth Gilbert has been hired to be a columnist for O Magazine, and her debut, “The Kind Gesture that Helps Elizabeth Gilbert Find the Light on Her Worst Days,” will appear in the next issue.
Penguin Press has released the cover image for Zadie Smith’s new novel, Swing Time, which will be released on November 15. The novel, which is set in London and West Africa, is, according to the publisher’s description, about two girls who want to become dancers: “One . . . has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free.” Readers of Smith’s criticism will recall that she wrote eloquently about the career of dancer Fred Astaire in an essay collected in Changing My Mind.
The editorial staff at Vice Media, which unionized last summer, has reached its first contract agreement with the company’s management. Sources say that the contract will increase most salaries by 30 percent over the next three years, and that annual salaries for editorial staff must now be at least $45,000.
Gawker is reportedly talking with Univision about starting Spanish-language versions of the sites Gizmodo and Lifehacker.
