At the New York Times, Parul Sehgal reviews Tove Ditlevsen’s Copenhagen trilogy, which she praises for its composure, noting: “For all the expected reasons, no quality is praised more strenuously in women’s writing than ‘control.’ See also ‘restraint’ and ‘lack of sentimentality.’ But control is just one effect, and in some ways the canniest — nothing else so efficiently earns the reader’s trust and can lull her into sleepy credulity.”
Writers make predictions on “Life After Trump” for a special supplement in the new issue of Harper’s Magazine. They cover an array of topics; read Charles Yu on what the end of the Trump presidency will mean for reality, A. S. Hamrah on movies, Lauren Oyler on conversation, Jane Hu on punctuation, Christian Lorentzen on literature, and more.
For the London Review of Books, Hazel Carby, scholar and author of Imperial Intimacies, discusses what Isabel Wilkerson’s Pulitzer-winning book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents misses about racial imaginaries: “Wilkerson sees caste as both cause and symptom of a Manichean division between black and white in the early days of North American colonisation, but this division tells us little about the effects of gender and class, and can’t account for indigeneity. If we broaden our understanding to include the history of racial geographies across the Americas, rather than uncritically accepting national boundaries established long after the European invasions, encounters with indigenous inhabitants become central to any attempt at making sense of the classification and division of humanity.”
After being dropped by Simon & Schuster, Senator Josh Hawley’s book on big tech will be published this May by conservative publisher Regnery. Simon & Schuster handles sales and distribution for Regnery in export markets.
Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, author of The Undocumented Americans, writes for the New Yorker about growing up as an undocumented immigrant. On first learning of her family’s immigration status, Villavicencio went online and came across the term “illegal alien,” she remembers feeling a rebellious excitement: “I knew it was form language, legalese meant to wound me, but it didn’t. It was punk as hell. We were hated, and maybe not entirely of this world. I had just discovered Kurt Cobain.”
