V.S. Naipaul—the Trinidad-born author who went on to become one of the most evocative portrayers of postcolonial life, winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 2001—has died at age eighty-five. Amitava Kumar ponders Naipaul’s complicated legacy. At the New Republic, Jeet Heer remembers the “towering writer and deeply flawed man.”
Stephen King inspired a “meme meltdown” when he asked his Twitter followers a question about Trump’s “space force.”
Harper Design will publish a book by Justin Timberlake this October.
At The Atlantic, Jesse Lichtenstein writes about “how poetry came to matter again.” Today’s poets “are immigrants and refugees from China, El Salvador, Haiti, Iran, Jamaica, Korea, Vietnam. They are black men and an Oglala Sioux woman. They are queer as well as straight and choose their personal pronouns with care. The face of poetry in the United States looks very different today than it did even a decade ago, and far more like the demographics of Millennial America.”
Rodale publishing has recalled Tales from a Forager’s Kitchen, a cookbook by Instagram star Johnna Holmgren that was released in May. Some of the recipes—which include ingredients such as raw morel mushrooms, elderberries, uncooked rice, and acorns—may be dangerous, the publisher says. Full refunds are being offered to anyone who has purchased the book.
Isaac Fitzgerald has announced that his first essay collection, Dirtbag, Massachusetts, has been purchased by Bloomsbury. “DIRTBAG, MASSACHUSETTS is going to be a deeply personal book,” writes Fitzgerald, who has worked at The Rumpus and is a cofounder of Buzzfeed Books. “These stories are my life. But I’m also hoping they’ll mean something to a wider audience, especially with young, angry men who are looking for a different path. The more you get out from under toxic masculinity, the better your life becomes. I know that because I’ve lived it. And try to continue to live it every day.”