Eric Banks and Robert Boynton have started posting recordings of lectures that have been given at the New York Institute for the Humanities. A few highlights so far: Ryszard Kapuscinski’s 2004 discussion of Herodotus, Susan Sontag’s 1977 lecture on “Illness as Metaphor,” and James Fenton’s interview of Christopher Hitchens about the latter’s memoir Hitch-22. You can find those recordings and more here.
The New York Times spotlights New Jersey’s Montclair Book Center, a 9,000-square-foot “throwback to a funkier, more literate time,” which is stocked with hundreds of thousands of best sellers, hidden treasures, and titles you “don’t know you need” until you come across them.
Bastard Out of Carolina author Dorothy Allison talks about being “trashy,” the challenges faced by Southern authors, and finding a “voice that is unique and your own.” “What I wanted was to have us—which is to say the people I loved and feared and was also in an embattled relationship with—I wanted us to at least be real. To make us real meant to write in a language that could not only speak beautifully about the people I love but also make the reader uncomfortable.”
The Financial Times has posted its list of the best 2019 books about economics.
Payne Lindsey and Donald Albright—the creators of the true-crime missing-persons podcast Up and Vanished—have signed a two-book deal with Dey Street for a reported six figures.
