The novelist Marilynne Robinson has her say on that “great orange-haired Unintended Consequence,” the nonfictional Donald Trump: He is “alarming as well as absurd, stirring and stoking the worst impulses in the electorate. But then this is only a darkening of the atmosphere we have lived in since Nixon, as fear and resentment began to be commodified very profitably by the likes of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.”
As the thaw between the US and Cuba continues, Publishers Weekly has called for an end to the embargo on books: “the Cuban people have not been able to read American authors for more than 50 years. American readers, meanwhile, have been denied access to the works of Cuban writers.”
The poet and novelist Wendell Berry pleasingly flouts the New York Times’s By the Book rules this week: No, he will not choose a favorite genre, short story (“Picking one would slight the others and waste time”), or poem (“Of the ones I need, I need all”). Nor, for that matter, will he recommend a book for the president to read, nor name one that shaped his own life: “As the product of at least two parents, I hesitate to see myself as derived from one book.”
And the Times sends its spies into the physical Amazon bookstore.
Punch Hutton, Vanity Fair’s deputy editor and a veteran of seventeen years at the magazine, is stepping down. And the New Yorker has a new managing editor, Emily Greenhouse.
Novelist Tony Tulathimutte commends the choose-your-own-adventure that is the humble preposition.
At Dissent, Tim Shenk spoke with the cultural historian Thomas W. Laqueur about The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains, a book he has worked on for forty years.
As of this week, Toni Morrison has given the first three of her six Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard. The series is entitled "The Origin of Others: The Literature of Belonging," and the next lecture, "Configurations of Blackness," will take place on March 22.
