“It's been really exciting to give myself the time to delve into nonfiction, specifically cultural histories of China and America at the turn of the twentieth century,” Ottessa Moshfegh told the Amazon Book Review about her next project, a novel about a Chinese immigrant coming to the US at the turn of the century. “I'm at the beginning of it, following breadcrumbs, and watching the story weave itself together. It's a delicious place to be in a project, before the grueling work of actually writing begins. So I'm taking my time.”
As part of its expansion into Europe, The Atlantic has hired Prashant Rao as global editor. Rao was most recently at the New York Times, where he focused on finance, economics, and business in Europe.
The National Book Critics Circle has announced their 2018 class of emerging critics.
Keanu Reeves talks to the T: The New York Times Style Magazine about his art book imprint, X Artists’ Books.
Knopf designer Janet Hansen reflects on the process of designing the cover for Nico Walker’s Cherry. Hansen writes that it was a particularly difficult job because the author was in prison with “limited access to text-only emails.”
“I’m often not a reader of books from one end to the other but a rover, as a result of more than half a lifetime of doing research in books, where you’re there not just for the pleasure (though there is often considerable pleasure) but to find out some particular thing,” Rebecca Solnit tells the New York Times’s By the Book column about her reading habits. “Also I get interrupted a lot, and misplace books in this house of books, and so one way or another I’m usually reading about a dozen books at a time.”
At The Outline, Jeremy Gordon makes a case for moving internet conversations away from Twitter and back to Tumblr. Although Tumblr’s insularity may “create overfamiliar bubbles prone to social regulation,” Gordon writes that this is preferable to Twitter’s free-for-all style. “Sometimes a overfamiliar bubble is more conducive to well-intentioned discourse, instead of a dozen randos screaming ‘what’s wrong with you, you Nazi and/or anti-Nazi fuck.’”
