At Literary Hub, Aaron Robertson considers the New Yorker Union’s recent victory in their campaign to end “at will” employment at the magazine.
At the New Republic, Alex Shephard adds his voice to Nobel Prize speculation season. In 2016, Shephard vowed that he would eat his copy of the album Blood On the Tracks if Bob Dylan won the Nobel. (Dylan did, Shephard didn’t.) Since then, Shephard has learned to embrace the prize’s unpredictability: “The only certainty about the Nobel Committee is that it does what it wants, while the only certainty about 2020 is that crazy shit happens all the time.”
The 2020 MacArthur Fellows have been announced. Among the “genius grant” winners are writers Tressie McMillan Cottom, Larissa FastHorse, N. K. Jemisin, and Fred Moten.
At Literary Hub, Rasheeda Saka talks with David Ulin about Air/Light, a new literary magazine interested in what it means “to write and edit from California” while participating in “a truly global literature.” You can read the inaugural issue here.
Editor and writer Natasha Lewis will join Timothy Shenk as co-editor of Dissent, which will also welcome eight new board members: Alyssa Battistoni, Siddhartha Deb, Adom Getachew, Sarah Jones, William P. Jones, Aziz Rana, Matthew Sitman, and Gabriel Winant.
Tonight, via Zoom, McNally Jackson Books will host Jason Diamond and Morgan Parker discussing Diamond’s new book, The Sprawl: Reconsidering the Weird American Suburbs.
