John Barth has died at the age of ninety-three. Barth was the author of more than twenty books of fiction and essays and a writing professor at Johns Hopkins, Penn State, SUNY Buffalo, and Boston University. The Paris Review has unpaywalled his 1985 “Art of Fiction” interview with George Plimpton. Reflecting on his time in the library stacks as a Johns Hopkins student, Barth tells Plimpton, “I was impressed forever with the width as well as the depth of literature—just what a kid from the sticks, from the swamp, in my case, needed.”
On Saturday, |https://peoplesforum.org/events/writers-for-palestine/#:~:text=April%2013%20%40%206%3A00%20pm%20%2D%208%3A00%20pm&text=The%20speakers%20will%20include%20Tareq,us%20remotely%E2%80%94%20Mosab%20Abu%20Toha.|April 13th|, at 6 pm, the People’s Forum in New York City will host a fundraiser for the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. “Writers for Palestine” will include readings by Tareq Baconi, Moustafa Bayoumi, Omar Berrada, Mona Chalabi, Anjali Khosla, Sahar Muradi, Sahar Romani, Pamela Sneed, Adeeba Shahid Talukder, Kamelya Omayma Youssef, and Mosab Abu Toha. You can RSVP for the in-person or online event here.
The American Society of Magazine Editors have announced the 2024 National Magazine Award Winners.
At LitHub, Adam Morgan talks to small publishers about the fallout from closing of Small Press Distributors (SPD), a longstanding indie-book institution and the only affordable option for many presses.
On the latest episode of The Critic and Her Publics, Moira Donegan talks with Merve Emre about her coming-of-age as a critic, how creating the “Shitty Media Men” list changed her life, and how she thinks about writing her weekly column for The Guardian. Emre also invites Donegan to close-read Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent in the Dobbs decision. Donegan says, “ This is writing in sweeping historic and moral terms. It is writing about the values of the nation. It is writing about what constitutes citizenship. It is writing about dignity as well as about material fairness. It is not about the technicalities of the law or the petty little rationalizations, often quite impressive in their flights of reasoning, that this court has made to justify a lot of its opinions. This is a moral document.”
