In a rumored six-figure deal, Scribner has bought two books by deputy op-ed editor Clay Risen: Red Scare, an analysis of hysteria over Communism in the US, and The Whiskey Barons, which is, according to the publisher, about “the epic clash of personalities in the Gilded Age between two business titans who battled for control of the whiskey industry.”
Dani Shapiro’s memoir Inheritance—about the crisis the author experienced after her assumptions about her family were destroyed by a DNA test—is being turned into a movie by Killer Films studio.
Art historian, critic, editor, and curator Douglas Crimp has died. Crimp’s work includes the book Our Kind of Movie: The Films of Andy Warhol, the memoir Before Pictures, and numerous essays including “Mourning and Militancy,” an influential meditation on gay men and activism in the midst of the AIDS crisis.
In a keynote address given at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Open City author and photography critic Teju Cole reflected on translation, empathy, the notion of “citizenship,” and what literature is good for. “We all live and die under essentially similar sovereign arrangements, are all subject to the same international banking system, the same alliances among rich nations. We are all citizens under these inescapable powers, but not all of us have our citizenship rights recognized.”
Poet and translator Marie Ponsot, who won the National Book Critics Circle Award for her 1998 book The Bird Catcher, has died.
Dan Chiasson considers the career of master absurdist James Tate.
"As a parent, you have to let your child teach you what kind of a parent they need you to be." An interview with author and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips.
