For the Paris Review Daily, Susan Choi writes about Sigrid Nunez’s 1995 debut, A Feather on the Breath of God, which is told in four parts. Nunez has described it as a work of autofiction, a term that, she told Choi, “she understands less with reference to such contemporaries as Rachel Cusk and Ben Lerner than to forebears such as Rilke and Proust.” Choi recalls her first encounter the “Chang” section of Nunez’s book: “Everything I read seemed to be a worse fit than before I’d ventured onto hyphenated ground, worse than my blithe trespasses on Austenian estates or to the Ramsays’ lighthouse, which I’d made without a thought to my credentials. Then 'Chang' shocked me with my own discomfort—it seemed to have eyes watching me from the page.”
The New York Times profiles Eden Bridgeman Sklenar as she leads the revival of Ebony magazine and the potential return of Jet. The new print edition of Ebony is set to publish quarterly in 2022. “We are hoping to uplift,” Sklenar said.
Unionized staffers have been laid off today at Vice. As Sara David notes, today is also election day for members of the Vice Union, which is organized under the Writers Guild of America, East.
At Vanity Fair, Emily Gould takes stock of the literary Jonathans—Franzen, Lethen, and Safran Foer—and how the publishing industry has and has not changed since they came up in the late-’90s and early aughts. “It might be too optimistic to think that we’ve shown the Jonathans the door in order to celebrate the Jesmyns and Sallys,” Gould writes. “More likely, the Jonathans saw the writing on the wall and got one foot out of this godforsaken business, following the money west to Hollywood.”
Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library has digitized over one million images from their collection. You can find an introduction to the searchable digital library here.
Maggie Nelson takes the New York Times’s “By the Book” Q&A. Nelson discusses her literary relationship with Christina Crosby, the author of A Body, Undone: Living On After Great Pain. “Crosby, who died this past January, often told me that she felt witnessed and fortified by my writing about her; I, in turn, ended up feeling witnessed and fortified by her writing about me. The positivity of that relay reminded me that autobiographical writing doesn’t always have to feel bad, it doesn’t always have to be a blood sport.”
LaKeith Stanfield is set to star in the Apple TV adaptation of Victor LaValle’s novel The Changeling. LaValle will be collaborating throughout the process with Kelly Marcel, writer, and Melina Matsoukas, director.
