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Writers remember Louise Glück; Sarah Schulman on manufactured consent and the Israel-Hamas war

Louise Glück. Photo © Katherine Wolkoff 

Louise Glück, the Nobel and Pulitzer winning poet and essayist, died on Friday last week. At the New Yorker, several writers, readers, and former students remember her work. Hilton Als writes: “Even though she was considered a confessional poet, along the lines of Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath, early in her career, I have to say that part of what I grew to love about her writing was how much she was hiding in plain sight within it. It is very difficult to find the metaphors that ring true about a life, but Glück achieved that again and again.”

For New York magazine, Sarah Schulman writes about Noam Chomsky’s concept of manufactured consent, the American response to the Israel-Hamas war, and the binary framework in which “any public outcry for Palensinians or allegiance with them becomes criminal,” as is the case in France and Germany, where public marches in support of the Palestinian people have been banned. 

The trailer for American Fiction, Cord Jefferson’s adaptation of Percival Everett’s novel Erasure (2001), has been released. The film, starring Jeffrey Wright, will be in theaters in December. 

Salman Rushdie has announced that he has written a memoir about the attack he suffered last August that left him blind in one eye. Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, will be published by Penguin Random House in April. 

More than 350 authors, editors, and publishers have signed an open letter in support of Palestinian author Adania Shibli in response to the decision by a literary organization partially funded by the Frankfurt Book Fair to call off its awards ceremony to honor Shibli’s 2020 novel Minor Detail “due to the war in Israel.”