Ohio author Hanif Abdurraqib appeared on CBS Mornings today to discuss his new book There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension, which mixes personal writing with reflections on LeBron James’s life story. “The alignment of the author’s life with that of its guiding spirit is made evident throughout the book. But it isn’t seamless, and it isn’t supposed to be,” Gene Seymour writes in his review for Bookforum.
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The 2024 shortlist for the International Booker Prize has been announced. The list features works from six countries in translation from six languages: Selva Almada’s Not a River, Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos, Ia Genberg’s The Details, Hwang Sok-yong’s Mater2-10, Jente Posthuma’s What I’d Rather Not Think About, and Itamar Viera Junior’s Crooked Plow.
Labor journalist Hamilton Nolan writes in his Substack How Things Work about Pamela Paul and other New York Times columnists “who fill the most scrutinized pages of the American press with flop-sweat-soaked works of unimaginable paltriness.” Nolan points out that the Times could theoretically hire anyone they want, and argues that “the existence of these uninspired and uninspiring people occupying the very best jobs in their industry is evidence of the limits of the ideals that liberal society purports to value.”
A fifty-hour marathon reading of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans will begin on April 19th in New York with dozens of readers over three days.
