Astra publishing house is launching a new literary magazine. Astra Quarterly will “have a strong international focus” and an “international network of editors.” Nadja Spiegelman, former online editor of the Paris Review and author of the memoir I’m Supposed to Protect You from All This, will be the editor in chief. According to Spiegelman: “I am delighted to join the Astra team in its deep desire to uphold voices across borders. The new generation of readers—from New York to Lagos, Paris to Shanghai, Mexico City to Berlin—has more in common than ever before. We hope to show audiences that literature from abroad can and will speak as directly to them as the writing found at home . . . There is an incredible wealth of new literature being written across the world, but to cut through the noise, it must be championed and promoted.”
While recording the audio version of his new memoir, On the House, John Boehner has apparently deviating from the original text, dropping expletives and asides not in the print version of the book, such as: “Oh, and Ted Cruz, go fuck yourself.”
In a wonderful essay on the legacy of the New York Times Book Review, Parul Sehgal assesses one hundred and twenty-five years’ worth of articles from the publication’s archives. “The relaxed, reflexive contempt of reviews of the past cannot be disentangled from their failures as pieces of criticism. They might stand in harsh judgment of the writer, but as examples of writing they’re soft. They rarely quote the book, or offer more than perfunctory summary. We hear little of style, of argument or technique. . . . They hover and mock, or patronize, the reviewer keeping his hands in his pockets all the while. He builds no case—he feels no need; the identity of the writer, the source of that obsessive fascination, appears to be all the evidence required for his scorn.”
Author Lawrence Otis Graham has died at fifty-nine. Graham, whose books include Member of the Club: Reflections on Life in a Racially Polarized World, left his job as a partner at a New York law firm to work cleaning tables at the Greenwich Country Club restaurant in 1992, an experience he described in a New York magazine story. “Quite frankly, I got into this country club the only way that a Black man like me could,” he wrote. “As a $7-an-hour busboy.”
Pioneering rock critic Jaan Uhelszki recounts her time working at Creem magazine.
Hillary Rodham Clinton is cowriting a thriller with Louise Penny. State of Terror will be released by St. Martin’s and Simon and Schuster on October 12.
