Mahogany L. Browne talks with Literary Hub about a new collection of Audre Lorde’s essays and speeches, Sister Outsider: “I have found Black authors constantly fueled by Lorde’s work but also diminished when they find their ‘allies’ aren’t as familiar with Lorde as they are of, say Foucault. And so, I see a constant effort of leveling the playing field (culturally, economically and socially) resulting in a fractured mindset of ‘wokeness’ and well-meaning folks.”
At The Cut, Emily Gould writes about working for Gawker in the late-2000s, and revisits the time she was shamed on television by Jimmy Kimmel, an experience that has haunted her: “In the years that followed my departure from Gawker, the experience of internet-based public disgrace became a familiar one—there was even a book about it, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, by Jon Ronson. In 2015, when the book came out, Ronson invited me to join him onstage at a comedy show, where he interviewed me and played the Jimmy Kimmel clip. Though I went along with it gamely because I still believed that, if I willed myself to, I could own the shame’s upside, I was thrown by how sad and angry I was afterward.”
Katie Hill, the democratic congresswoman who resigned during an ethics investigation after nude photos were posted on the web without her consent, is writing a memoir. She Will Rise will be published on August 18th by Grand Central Publishing.
James McBride talks about the books and authors he loves. McBride’s new novel, Deacon King Kong, will be published on March 3rd.
On Monday at the Strand in NYC, Vivian Gornick will discuss her new book Unfinished Business. In Bookforum, Christopher Sorrentino writes of Gornick’s memoir: “Is treason too strong a word to describe the act of reading? Certainly the systematized reading Gornick pursued within a college literature program during the mid-’50s must have instilled in her a sense of all the subversive uses to which literature may be put.”
