The longlist for the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction has been announced. The shortlist will be revealed on April 28 and the winner on July 7. On Twitter, Torrey Peters, the first trans woman to be nominated, wrote: “I’m very honored to have DETRANSITION, BABY long-listed for the Women’s Prize. I was eligible this year due to work by those before me—especially Akwaeke Emezi. Once again, I am indebted to a sacrifice made by a black trans person. Congratulations to my fellow longlisters.” In 2019, Emezi had been nominated for the prize but asked that their future novels not be considered after receiving a request from the organizers for information about their sex as deinfed “by law.”
Haymarket Books is turning their live series into a podcast. Recent episodes of Haymarket Books Live include discussions of objectivity in journalism, Palestine, China’s workforce, and abolitionist social work.
In Esquire, Jeff Sharlet marks the one-year anniversary of the COVID pandemic by remembering some of those who have died. “Whenever the numbers from which I couldn’t look away began to overwhelm, I’d take a tour of the local news . . . to study the faces of the dead. I’d make screen grabs and search for further details on Facebook and funeral-home pages. Saymon Jefferson, ninety-four, who refused a ventilator so he could say goodbye; Jameela Dirrean-Emoni Barber, seventeen, a cadet in her school’s Junior ROTC; a man named Larry Annuschat, who in just weeks lost ‘the whole kitchen cabinet,’ three brothers and a sister. I’d sit up late, after my children were asleep, arranging what I had found. It was a way of driving off the abstraction. It felt not morbid but hopeful.”
In The American Prospect, Sarah Jaffe writes about the unionizing effort at Gimlet Media.
Harmony Holiday writes about a 1973 conversation between Josephine Baker, James Baldwin, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. Gates had been assigned to interview Baker and Baldwin for Time magazine, though the publication declined to run the piece, deeming it “passé.” As Holiday observes, “Gates’s interview lets us witness Jimmy and Josephine choosing themselves, away from the country that endangers their psyches; they are relaxed, casual, in a land far from toxic scrutiny.”
“Long-form journalism is stronger than ever. It's just packaged differently,” Axios reports, noting that while the average word count of news stories has decreased in the past year, major stories are often accompanied online by podcasts, newsletters, and documentaries.
