The poet C. D. Wright—whose books include Cooling Time (2005) and the award-winning One with Others (2010)—died earlier this week. Her book Shallcross is scheduled for publication in April. At the New Yorker, Ben Lerner reflects on Wright’s “peculiar brilliance,” and writes that “she was part of a line of mavericks and contrarians who struggled to keep the language particular in times of ever-encroaching standardization.” And at the Awl, poet Mark Bibbins posts Wright’s “only the crossing counts”: “It’s not how we leave one’s life. How go off / the air. You never know, do you. You think you’re ready / for anything; then it happens, and you’re not.”
The Huffington Post has decided it will voluntarily recognize its employees’ union representation, the Writers Guild of America, East. WGAE has held union drives at many media companies over the past year, including Salon, Vice Media, and Gawker. An internal survey of Gawker employees taken by the union gives a glimpse of what contract negotiations at the site might look like. According to the document (which was leaked to the International Business Times), Gawker employees value editorial freedom above all other priorities, and have shown little interest in arguing for a “just cause” provision in their contract.
The American Society of Magazine Editors has announced its finalists for the 2016 National Magazine Awards. Some of the notable nominees are Patrick Radden Keefe for his New Yorker story about Gerry Adams and the IRA, “Where the Bodies Are Buried” (this the third consecutive year that Radden Keefe has been nominated); three columns by the imprisoned journalist Barrett Brown for the Intercept, including “Stop Sending Me Jonathan Franzen Novels”; Rebecca Solnit’s Easy Chair column for Harper’sMagazine, including “Abolish High School”; and Slate’s incredible multimedia feature, “The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Minutes,” by Andrew Kahn and Jamelle Bouie. With so many outstanding stories to choose from, we can’t pick a favorite, but we will say this: Kathryn Schulz’s terrifying story about the inevitable big earthquake in the Pacific Northwest still keeps us up some nights.
Susan Glasser, Politico’s editor, is reportedly talking with the New York Times about becoming a contributor.
LaVoy Finicum, one of the members of the Oregon militia that has taken over a national wildlife refuge, is the author of the post apocalyptic novel,Only by Blood and Suffering, which the author describes as “a stirring, fast-paced novel about what matters most in the face of devastating end-times chaos.”
The Library of America has just published two of Henry James’s memoirs in a new volume, Henry James: Autobiographies. In the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik makes an interesting comparison between the labyrinthine (and occasionally exhausting) sentences of James and those of David Foster Wallace: “Wallace . . . mentions James not at all in his critical writings, and though one might take his qualifications and circlings back as Jamesian, they are employed to discriminate not more finely but to discriminate not at all—to get it in, rather than to pare it down. In a time of linguistic overkill, like the nineteen-forties, we look to literature for a language of emotional caution; in an age of irony, we look for emotional authenticity.” (For more on James’s memoirs, see Andrew Solomon’s 2002 review in Bookforum.)
