At the New York Review of Books, Leslie Jamison writes about Divorcing, the 1969 novel by Susan Taubes, as well as the divorces in Taubes’s life and her own: “I wanted to understand my own divorce plot as one pointed toward rebirth. Perhaps my refusal to let the shadow of Taubes’s suicide color the entire book—to resist conflating novel with confession, or character with author—was a dressed-up version of an equally subjective impulse: the sharp tug of my own desire to find creative vitality and daily possibility on the other side of divorce.”
The 2021 International Booker Prize shortlist has been announced, including Sasha Dugdale’s translation of In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova, Mark Polizzotti’s translation of Éric Vuillard’s The War of the Poor, and others.
To celebrate National Poetry Month, the Mellon Foundation has partnered with the Academy of American Poets to present ten classic poems curated by ten contemporary poets, including Tina Chang, Natalie Diaz, Jericho Brown, and Robin Coste Lewis.
Vulture has collected the accounts of thirty-three former interns and assistants who worked for film and theater producer Scott Rudin between 1994 and 2020. “The portrait of Rudin that emerges from their stories is remarkably consistent: constant verbal berating, sleep deprivation, and an ambient, paralytic fear dedicated to fulfilling the most mundane tasks, like ordering food or binding scripts.”
NeimanLab discusses a new report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism that shows how “trust in news is not a single concept but a mix of attitudes.” The specifics of a news organization’s reporting and fact-checking policies seem to matter less in these evaluations of trust than how such organizations present themselves as brands.
Next Thursday, April 29, n+1 is hosting Gabriel Winant for a discussion of his book The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America. He will be joined by Pennsylvania State Senator Nikil Saval, State Representative Summer Lee, and Lisa Frank of the Service Employees International Union Healthcare Pennsylvania.
