paper trail

Zakiya Dalila Harris on her new book; Jessi Jezewska Stevens on self-help and Sally Rooney

Zakiya Dalila Harris. Photo: © Nicole Mondestin Photography.

The New York Times profiles Zakiya Dalila Harris, the author of The Other Black Girl, based in part on Harris’s experiences working in publishing. The book, which is also being developed as a TV series for Hulu, started a bidding war with fourteen publishers vying for the title. Harris says she was inspired by Jordan Peele’s Get Out: “Talking about white liberals in this way seemed so new to me at the time, and I really wanted to do something similar with the book.”

This fall, Haymarket Books will publish a third edition of Black Liberation activist and scholar Angela Davis’s An Autobiography, which was originally edited by Toni Morrison and released in 1974.

The New York Times is looking to buy the subscription-based sports website The Athletic.

Jessi Jezewska Stevens, author of The Exhibition of Persephone Q, writes about careerism in American letters with a focus on “Rooneyism,” self-improvement, and neoliberalism: “If we’re annoyed by the way the books flinch at the will to power (and not annoyed at the pessimism or paralysis we find in Lessing or Zola), it shouldn’t be because the books are sham-Marxist, or insufficiently socialist, or even careerist, or worse because we presume that Rooney, a younger female novelist, isn’t fully in control of dramatizing that kind of struggle—but because we miss the kind of fiction that lets the id roam free, or at least a little freer.”

Tonight, McNally Jackson Books will host a virtual event with Suchitra Vijayan talking about her new book, Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India, with Gaiutra Bahadur.

Next Tuesday, June 1, at 7pm EST, the Lambda Literary Awards will be presented virtually for the first time in the ceremony’s thirty-plus year history. This year, the Lammy will be hosted by Rakesh Satyal and awards will be presented by R. O. Kwon, Carmen Maria Machado, Torrey Peters, and more.