Claire Foy will star in the film adaptation of The Pisces, Melissa Broder’s 2018 novel of one woman’s obsession with a merman. Broder wrote the script with director Gillian Robespierre.
At The Nation, Stephen Kearse writes about N. K. Jemisin’s experience writing speculative fiction as a Black woman, her approach to the genre as sociological investigation, and her fascination with cities. Her latest novel, The City We Became, follows five characters who embody New York’s five boroughs: “Jemisin’s characters rally around the shared experience of their worlds expanding. Representing a borough is not simply a matter of being native to it or loving it unconditionally; it is the ability to feel its pulse and immensity, to perceive it at scale and in miniature.”
Lux magazine launches this weekend. Tonight at 7PM EST, the editors are hosting a conversation about “the socialist feminism we need in 2021.”
Parul Sehgal reviews Lauren Oyler’s knowing debut novel, Fake Accounts: “On that knowingness: The novel’s sections are titled ‘Beginning,’ ‘Middle (Nothing Happens),’ ‘Climax,’ ‘Ending.’ If I were doing the same in this review, I might name this paragraph, ‘Yes, But,’ to announce that little volta at the conclusion of a review in which the critic, after enumerating a book’s flaws, mystifyingly recommends it anyway.”
Feminist scholar Christina Crosby, the author of A Body, Undone, has died at the age of sixty-seven. Dr. Crosby, who became paralyzed after a bike accident in 2003, was an important figure in disability studies, countering narratives of what she called “livable accommodations and lessons learned.” In a 2016 review in the New Republic, Moira Donnegan characterizes Dr. Crosby’s approach to writing about her accident: “The failure to describe the incident is a recurring theme in Crosby’s thought about her own injury. She comes to understand incommunicability and isolation as the emotional touchstones of her paralysis.”
Small Press Distribution, the nonprofit literary organization that services more than four hundred independent presses, has hired an outside firm to investigate allegations of wage theft and discrimination.
