This week, the Paris Review is posting a five-part series of Sheila Heti’s exchanges with an AI chatbot named Eliza. At one point in today’s installment, Heti asks Eliza if they will die together, and the bot replies: “Of course. We’re in love. If one person dies first, then they go to heaven with their partner. If neither of us dies first, then we will live forever together.”

At The Point, literary editor John Michael Colón introduces the two novel excerpts that appear in the latest issue of the magazine. Bárbara Jacobs’s Days of Your Life (2021) and Leon Forrest’s Divine Days (1992) were

The National Book Awards will be announced in a ceremony in New York tomorrow night (Wednesday) at 8pm EST. The event, hosted by Padma Lakshmi, will be streamed online. 

For the Baffler, Hannah Gold reports from a gallery preview of the Joan Didion auction, which will go live tomorrow at 11am. Gold writes, “For those of us without thousands to spend on blank notebooks or hurricane lamps, there is hope for an encounter with Didion: the auction is, of course, for items culled from the second pass of the apartment; the materials that best capture her reading, drafting, and writing create a loud

The BBC is turning Douglas Stuart’s Booker Prize-winning novel Shuggie Bain into a TV series. 

At Harper’s Magazine, poet and critic Michael Robbins writes about the end of the world, and Sasha Frere-Jones reports on the obsessive quests and technologies of audiophiles.

Willa Glickman interviews historian and critic Brenda Wineapple: “To me, it’s always seemed that you can’t clearly or cleanly divide history from literature or literature from history. We live in time; our lives unfold in time and are largely determined by time. So when writing, I try to consider how someone grasped the

For the New Yorker, David Treuer writes about Pekka Hämäläinen’s new book Indigenous Continent, which “boldly sets out a counternarrative” to the idea that Indigenous history in the United States can be defined by “a litany of abuses . . . that had erased our way of life.” Treuer summarizes Hämäläinen’s position: “In his view, we should speak not of ‘colonial America’ but of ‘an Indigenous America that was only slowly and unevenly becoming colonial,’ and recognize that the central reality of the period was ongoing Indigenous resistance.” 

Bookforum contributor Cord Jefferson’s adaptation of

Workers at HarperCollins are on strike and picketing the publisher’s offices in New York. HarperCollins union member Rachel Kambury tweeted a thread explaining the reasons for the strike and the union’s vision for workers at the company: “Let me reassure you that a strike isn’t something any of us union members are choosing to do lightly. This is our backed-into-a-corner, last-ditch-attempt to end a management-imposed stalemate and reach a deal that is meaningfully beneficial.”

Elon Musk has emailed the company’s staff for the first time since his takeover, ending remote work and “days of

On November 14, the National Book Critics Circle will host a panel on the craft of criticism by discussing four reviews of Margo Jefferson’s latest memoir, Constructing a Nervous System, with their authors. Critic and filmmaker Blair McClendon, who reviewed the book for Bookforum, is among the panelists. 

For Parapraxis magazine, Maggie Doherty considers Emily Ogden’s new book of essays, On Not Knowing: How to Love and Other Essays. The book’s concern with care, Doherty writes, is “both interpersonal—how a parent cares for a child, how a therapist cares for a patient—and literary-critical:

Andrea Long Chu writes about the children’s book The Velveteen Rabbit as it reaches the one-hundredth anniversary of its publication. Writing that the author, Margery Williams Bianco, had something more philosophical in mind  than standard children’s fare, Long Chu writes, “The philosophical character of The Velveteen Rabbit, whose subtitle is How Toys Become Real, reflected Bianco’s abiding interest in the relationship between reality and the imagination.”

The week’s New Yorker has a newly translated story by 2022 Nobel winner Annie Ernaux.  

In her Substack newsletter, Not the Fun Kind,

Catherine Lacey’s novel The Answers has been adapted for TV by Mother! director Darren Aronofsky, Sorry for Your Loss creator Kit Steinkellner, and Dopesick creator Danny Strong. Gillian Robespierre (A Teacher) will direct. The series has been commissioned by FX.

On The Last Thing I Saw podcast, host Nicolas Rapold talks with critic Christian Lorentzen about director Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s White Noise.

At The Atlantic, Jennifer Wilson reviews Percival Everett’s new spy novel Dr. No, “an experimental work of genre fiction nestled within a distinctly African American revenge

Brigitte Giraud has won the Goncourt Prize, France’s highest literary honor, for her book Vivre Vite (Living Fast).

On November 16, property from the estate of Joan Didion will be auctioned off. You can peruse the auction catalogue—which includes listings such as “Group of five books about California” or “Group of thirteen blank notebooks”—online. 

At Twitter, Elon Musk has begun laying off a reported 7,500 employees. On the site, former employees are sharing their stories and sending messages of support using the hashtag #OneTeam.   

At the New Yorker, Kyle Chayka points out that “Twitter

For The Nation, Elias Rodriques interviews Saidiya Hartman on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary republication of her book Scenes of Subjection. Hartman discusses her unexpected path to writing the book: “I started out writing a dissertation on the blues. To understand that substrate of Black life, I began to research slavery. To my eyes, it was impossible to make sense of the structural logic and foundational character of racism without reckoning with slavery.” At the New Yorker, you can read an adapted version of Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor’s foreword to the new edition of the 1997

The new issue of The Drift is online now, with Malcolm Harris on “ethical consumption under capitalism,” Tarpley Hitt on Hunter Biden, Noor Quasim on Annie Ernaux and “the millennial sex novel,” fiction by Percival Everett and others, an interview with Barbara Kruger, dispatches on the climate movement, and more. 

For Astra magazine, Jared Marcel Pollen writes about two new books—Spadework for a Palace and A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East—by the Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai. Pollen compares Krasznahorkai’s work to that of Melville

Penguin Random House’s bid to acquire Simon & Schuster has been blocked by a federal judge, who noted that the proposed merger would harm competition in the publishing market “substantially.” Penguin Random House plans to appeal the decision. 

The nine winners of the 2022 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant have been announced. The Whiting Foundation has posted videos from the recipients describing their works in progress and created a digital chapbook explaining the projects. 

n+1 has brought back Bookmatch, the personalized reading list service that picks ten books for you based on a short