Tsitsi Dangarembga, author of This Mournable Body and Nervous Conditions, has been awarded the PEN Pinter Prize, which celebrates authors of a significant body of work which examines the world with, in Harold Pinter's words, an “unflinching, unswerving” gaze and “fierce intellectual determination.” Previous winners include Tom Stoppard, Salman Rushdie, and Chmamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Michelle Zauner’s novel Crying in H Mart is being adapted for film. Zauner, who also makes music using the name Japanese Breakfast, will contribute a soundtrack.
Leo Robson writes about the late theorist J. Hillis Miller’s contributions to literary deconstruction for the New Left Review’s Sidecar blog. As early as 1972, Miller “was not content to offer deconstruction as an alternative to what he considered ‘logical’ historicism. He saw it as a truly materialist aesthetics.” His subsequent work, Robson writes, advances comparisons of “Derridean analysis of the word and its dominance to Marx on money and commodity.”
Stella Bugbee, most recently the editor at large of New York magazine, has been named the new Styles editor at the New York Times.
The Spring issue of Jewish Currents features a folio on Romanian poet Paul Celan, following the 2020 centennial of his birth. In addition to excerpts from Celan’s poetry collections, a comic by Anne Carson based on “Todnauberg,” and reflections on his work and translatability by Michael Hofmann, Aria Aber, Fanny Howe, and others, the online edition of the folio includes poems by Rose Ausländer and Celan’s cousin Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger, who died in a Nazi labor camp.
The New Yorker Union staged a protest outside the townhouse of Condé Nast icon Anna Wintour chanting, “Bosses wear Prada, workers get nada!” The union, which says it is on the verge of a strike, has been bargaining with management for more than two years.
Dave Eggers’s new novel won’t be available as a hardcover on Amazon. The hardcover version of the book, which comes out in October, will be restricted to independent bookstores only, while the paperback, published six weeks later, will be available everywhere.
