National Book Award winner Tiya Miles, the author of All That She Carried, has sold her new book Harriet’s Mirror to Random House. According to the publisher, the book is “a dual literary biography of Harriet Jacobs, the author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin."
In the wake of Alice Sebold’s statement that she wrongly identified Anthony Broadwater as the man who raped her in 1988, Laura Miller revisits the author’s book Lucky. “As I reread this memoir now, the narrator of Lucky transforms from a brave survivor summoning the will to bring her rapist to justice into an isolated, psychologically damaged girl making a desperate but delusional bid to regain her life,” Miller writes. “Sebold committed a terrible wrong in identifying Broadwater as her attacker, but it’s not the responsibility of a traumatized rape victim to fairly investigate and prosecute the person who assaulted her. That is the duty of the police and prosecutors, who failed both Sebold and Broadwater at every stage, from the moment she first reported the crime to the moment he was convicted.”
At Air Mail, Bill Adair writes about Stephen Glass—who scandalized the media world in 1998 when it was revealed that many of his articles for the New Republic were built on elaborate fabrications (later recounted in his 2003 novel The Fabulist)—and his marriage to Julie Hilden, the author of the memoir The Bad Daughter, who developed early-onset Alzheimer’s and died in 2018.
Rosa Lyster describes the pleasures of reading (and rereading) the comic novelist Charles Portis: “Portis’s imagination is truly wild—both unhampered and unpredictable—and reading him for the first time required a significant adjustment to all my previously gathered knowledge of what a person can or should put in a novel if they want it to be good. He is unbeatable at the non sequitur, so that every paragraph contains the possibility of crazed escalation.”
Tonight at 7:30pm Eastern time, novelist Jacqueline Woodson (Red at the Bone, Another Brooklyn) will talk with philosopher Myisha Cherry about Cherry’s new book, The Case for Rage: Why Anger Is Essential to Anti-Racist Struggle.
