Via LitHub, the trailer for Sarah Polley’s film adaptation of Miriam Toews’s novel Women Talking. Leslie Jameson reviewed the book for the summer 2019 issue of Bookforum. 

Astra magazine’s new issue, on “filth,” is online now. The editors write, “There is a moral element to filth. It is both what we have been taught to hide, and the subversive pleasure in revealing it.” The magazine’s second issue covers its subject in poetry, fiction, essays, memoir, and more.

In Tablet magazine, J. Hoberman looks at the work of Diane Arbus, as David Zwirner Gallery celebrates the fifty-year anniversary of

For the New York Times Magazine, Christine Smallwood profiles Lydia Millet, whose latest novel, Dinosaurs, will be published next week. Millet lives in Arizona, where she works at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Writing and conservation are both aspects of vocation for me,” she tells Smallwood. “She wouldn’t feel like herself if she didn’t write novels and stories, but ‘it feels self-indulgent to do only that. It’s not the same as action.’” 

In the current issue of the New York Review of Books, Sigrid Nunez reviews Getting Lost, the newly translated 2001 diary by 2022 Nobel Literature

The French novelist and memoirist Annie Ernaux has been awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in literature. Ernaux, an autofiction innovator with about twenty works to her name, is published in the US by the indie press Seven Stories. The press tweeted an exuberant thread, including thanks for Ernauax’s English translators, Alison L. Strayer, Tanya Leslie, and Anna Moschovakis, and links to buy Ernaux hats and shirts with her name printed in a death-metal font. Bookshop.org is running a sale on her books (though most are now on backorder). Ernaux’s most recent book translated into English is Getting

Oprah Daily has the cover reveal for Brandon Taylor’s forthcoming novel The Late Americans, which will be published in May 2023 by Riverhead.

Elon Musk is reportedly moving forward in his bid to buy Twitter for $44 billion. 

For the New York Times, poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib writes about country music star Loretta Lynn, who died this week at the age of ninety: “I found her to be one of the great romanticists because she was so committed to the rigors of loving herself that she suffered no one. She’d be quick to tell you what you weren’t gonna do on her watch.” 

In the New Republic,

The National Book Foundation has announced the finalists for the National Book Award.  

The Onion has submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in support of Anthony Novak, a parodist who created a fake Facebook page for the Parma Police department in Ohio. The brief states, “As the globe’s premier parodists, The Onion’s writers also have a self-serving interest in preventing political authorities from imprisoning humorists. This brief is submitted in the interest of at least mitigating their future punishment.”

For Lux magazine, Vivian Gornick writes about her years in psychoanalysis,

Victor LaValle is adapting his novel The Devil in Silver into a miniseries, which will air on AMC. According to Deadline magazine: “The Devil in Silver would be the first season in a potential new horror anthology series for AMC and AMC+ that will feature average people caught up in horrific stories in today’s world.”

LitHub weighs in on who will win the next Nobel Prize. 

Early reviewers of Blonde, the new film based on Joyce Carol Oates’s novel of Marilyn Monroe, have not been kind. 

Grove Press has purchased Prophet, a new novel co-written by Helen Macdonald (H Is for Hawk) and musician

PEN International has issued a statement on the conviction of Zimbabwean author and filmmaker Tsitsi Dangarembga, who was arrested without explanation or charge while peacefully protesting with her friend Julie Barnes in 2020, and later arraigned in court for “incitement to public violence” and “breaching of COVID-19 health regulations.” Per PEN’s statement, which was released yesterday: “Tsitsi Dangarembga and Julie Barnes should be celebrated as model citizens, not condemned as criminals following a sham trial on trumped up charges of promoting public violence. We called for and expected

As part of its “At Home in Asian America” feature package, New York magazine has a profile of Cathy Park Hong by Clio Chang. Hong is a poet and the author of Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. Discussing the wide resonance of that 2020 book, Chang writes, “At the time, there were a handful of prominent Asian American writers but no one who served the function of a catchall spokesperson for the idea of Asian America.” 

For the New Yorker, Keith Gessen talked to experts in war-termination theory about possible outcomes in Ukraine. 

In the Paris Review, Darryl Pinckney writes about

As part of a special editorial package “At Home in Asian America: Who Are We Becoming?” in this week’s issue of New York magazine, Andrea Long Chu writes about Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts and considers what it and other “mixed Asian novels” offer readers. For Chu, these are novels written by people who, like their main characters, “are of both white and East or Southeast Asian ancestry”; these characters tend to share “a gnawing uncertainty” about their race and what it means to them. “Asian America is not an idea for these authors,” Chu writes, “but a sensation, a mild, chronic homesickness;

For Electric Literature’s “What Comes Next” series, in which debut authors talk about their second book, Isle McElroy talks with Torrey Peters. Peters tells McElroy, “When I thought of writing as a craft, I don’t think I knew what writing was for. I thought if you write something beautiful that is enough. Now, I feel that writing is largely about communicating something urgent to certain people.” 

Bookforum is hosting a free online event on September 30th. “Sports Annotated,” will feature Lindsay Zoladz, Miranda Popkey, Ross Gay, and Thomas Beller discussing sports and literature. You can get

Publishers Weekly reports from the Joan Didion memorial service, which took place last week at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Speakers included Didion’s Knopf editor Shelley Wanger; New Yorker editor David Remnick; author and musician Patti Smith; actor Vanessa Redgrave; politician Jerry Brown; poet Kevin Young; and writers Hilton Als, Susanna Moore, Jia Tolentino, and Calvin Trillin. Nic Rowan provides his account of the Didion memorial at The Lamp: “The celebration, after all, was a publishing house’s attempt at making the myth of Didion as the Last All-American Writer.” 

This fall,

Hilary Mantel, the British author of seventeen books including Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, and The Mirror and the Light—which comprise her trilogy based on Thomas Cromwell’s life—has died at the age of seventy. In addition to her prize-winning historical fiction, Mantel wrote criticism and essays for the London Review of Books, contributing over fifty pieces since 1987. Today, the Review will unpaywall and share a selection of those writings. At his Substack, Leo Robson reflects on Mantel’s philosophy of historical fiction, her influences, and her friendship and collaboration with the