Maggie Nelson and Claudia Rankine have been awarded MacArthur Fellowships, also known as “Genius Grants.” Robert Caro, author of The Power Broker and an epic multivolume biography of Lyndon Johnson, will receive the National Book Award medal for lifetime achievement.
Gizmodo Media group—the company formerly known as Gawker Media—has named Raju Narisetti as its new CEO. Narisetti, who is currently a senior vice-president at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., will begin his new gig in October.
Publishers Weekly reports some bleak book-sales numbers: The first quarter of 2016 saw a 10 percent drop in print-book sales and a 19 percent fall in e-book sales. On the bright side, downloadable audiobooks saw sales rise by 36 percent, and trade-paperback purchases nudged upwards by 1.5 percent.
Publishers WeeklyDrew Magary, author of the novels The Hike and The Postmortal, sends a heated message to anyone planning to vote for Trump in the upcoming election: “Screw you.” Meanwhile, Evan Osnos, author of Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, imagines what Trump, if elected, would do in his first term.
At the New Yorker, music critic Hua Hsu (A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific) has penned an appreciation of critic Greg Tate, who recently published a collection of essays, interviews, and short takes titled Flyboy 2: The Greg Tate Reader. Tate, a former staff writer for the Village Voice, is known for his unmistakable style, critical engagement, and revelatory juxtapositions: “His best paragraphs throbbed like a party and chattered like a salon; they were stylishly jam-packed with names and reference points that shouldn’t have got along but did.” The Reader compiles thirty years of Tate’s work, including conversations with Ice Cube and Miles Davis, essays on artist Kara Walker and Kehinde Wiley, reviews of Eminem and Azealia Banks, and obituaries for Amiri Baraka and Richard Pryor. As Hsu writes, “For a generation of critics, Tate’s career has served as a reminder that diversity isn’t just about a splash of color in the group photo; it’s about the different ways that people see, feel, and move within the world.”
ReaderTonight in New York, the Red Ink reading series will present its second event, “Writing the Body.” Participants include Eileen Myles, Alexandra Kleeman, Porochista Khakpour, Ruth Ozeki, and others.