In The Guardian, Moira Donegan covers last night’s presidential debate: “Trump failed to convincingly land attacks on Harris, and instead he spent much of the night arguing on the turf that his opponent chose for him. There was no bait she offered him that he didn’t take.” Tonight at Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon, Charlotte […]
For The Nation, Benjamin Kunkel considers Daniel Susskind’s Growth: A History and a Reckoning and Kohei Saito’s Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, and cites a recent Nature article stating that due to the effects of climate change, “the world economy is committed to an income reduction of 19% within the next 26 years independent of […]
In a column for Harper’s Magazine, Hari Kunzru writes about his decision to withdraw from the PEN America literary festival as a protest against the organization’s failure to stand up for Palestinian writers. Kunzru takes on critics such as George Packer, who claim that an “authoritarian spirit” motivates critics of the war in Gaza who […]
At The Guardian, Sammy Feldblum profiles Daniel Denvir, the journalist and host of the socialist podcast The Dig. Since October 7, the podcast has been primarily devoted to discussing the war in Gaza and the “reactionary, colonialist propaganda” about the Arab world in the US. This week, Denvir is attending the DNC as an alternate […]
In an essay for the London Review of Books, Anne Carson writes about Parkinson’s, how it has changed her handwriting, and learning to use concentration and movement to work against the development of tremors. “Righting oneself against a current that never ceases to pull: the books tell me to pay conscious, continual attention to actions […]
At the end of this month, n+1 will publish The Intellectual Situation: The Best of n+1’s Second Decade, an anthology featuring contributions to the magazine by Andrea Long Chu, Tobi Haslett, Elizabeth Schambelan, Jesse McCarthy, A. S. Hamrah, Tony Tulathimutte, and more. On the LARB Radio Hour podcast, editors Dayna Tortorici and Mark Krotov discuss […]
Essayist and editor Lewis Lapham has died at the age of eighty-nine. Lapham was the editor in chief at Harper’s Magazine for almost three decades (1976–1981; 1983–2006) during which he introduced features that remain fixtures of the magazine today: “The Harper’s Index,” “Readings,” and “Annotations.” In 2006 he founded Lapham’s Quarterly with the goal to […]
In an excerpt from her forthcoming book An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work, Charlotte Shane reflects on what her clients revealed when they talked to her about their wives, and how this information affected Shane’s view of her own role. “My allegiance was forever shifting between the two, the husband and […]
Hillbilly Elegy author, former venture capitalist, and Ohio senator J. D. Vance is Trump’s running mate. We’re revisiting Frank Guan’s piece in the Feb/March 2018 issue of Bookforum about Elizabeth Catte’s What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia: “Though the referent of the accusatory ‘you’ in the title is left intentionally vague, it clearly points […]
Andrea Robin Skinner, daughter of the late Canadian writer Alice Munro, has published an account in the Toronto Star revealing the sexual abuse she suffered as a child at the hands of her stepfather, Munro’s late husband Gerald Fremlin. Skinner writes about telling Munro about the abuse, which occurred in 1976, years later only to […]
The Summer 2024 issue of Bookforum is reaching subscribers and newsstands now! In this edition: A. S. Hamrah on Emily Nussbaum’s history of reality TV, Janique Vigier on Caroline Blackwood’s bleak comic world, Gene Seymour on how the early ’90s set the stage for America’s crooked present, Charlotte Shane on Miranda July’s mischievous midlife-crisis novel, […]
The final episode of the Longform Podcast, a conversation with John Jeremiah Sullivan, was posted today. Since the podcast started in 2012, hosts Aaron Lammer, Max Linsky, and Evan Ratliff have published 585 conversations with writers, editors, and artists. At Vulture, Longform fans and media critics pick some of the pod’s best episodes. Harper’s Magazine […]
The Booker Prize–winning novelist Arundhati Roy is facing prosecution under India’s harsh anti-terror laws for comments she made about Kashmir fourteen years ago. The writer Amitav Ghosh wrote on X: “The hounding of Arundhati Roy is absolutely unconscionable. She is a great writer and has the right to her opinion. There should be an international […]
Literary Hub has published an excerpt from The Uptown Local, Cory Leadbeater’s memoir about the nine years he spent as Joan Didion’s assistant and friend. Leadbeater writes about learning to avoid small talk around Didion and recalls her matter-of-fact way of dealing with problems and giving advice: “We’ve got to get to the bottom of […]
The summer issue of the Yale Review asks: “What do we need from criticism?” In her editor’s note, Meghan O’Rourke introduces essays by Christine Smallwood, Merve Emre, Namwali Serpell, Teju Cole, and Brian Dillon, among others. In her essay “A Reviewer’s Life,” Bookforum contributor Christine Smallwood argues that criticism is always an autobiographical act: “In […]
The 2024 International Booker Prize has been awarded to Jenny Erpenbeck for her novel Kairos, translated by Michael Hofmann. Erpenbeck has said of the book, “It’s a private story of a big love and its decay, but it’s also a story of the dissolution of a whole political system. Simply put: How can something that […]
Alice Munro, the Canadian author of fourteen original short-story collections, has died at the age of ninety-two. Munro’s 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature was seen as a triumph for the art of the short story; the Swedish Academy described her as a master of the genre, echoing many critics, readers, and writers including Cynthia Ozick, […]
The 2024 Pulitzer Prize winners have been announced. The Pulitzer Board gives this year’s Special Citations to the late critic and musician Greg Tate (1957–2021) and to journalists covering the war in Gaza. At the New Republic, Alex Shephard writes about the disingenuous media coverage of the antiwar protests on college campuses. Coverage focused on […]
As students have taken over Hamilton Hall at Columbia, more than 2500 professors, academics, writers have pledged to boycott Columbia University and Barnard College. In an open letter, the signatories write, “We stand in full solidarity with the brave students, clerical staff, graduate workers, post-doctoral workers, and faculty at Columbia, Barnard, and Teacher’s College resisting […]
Student journalists at Columbia University have extensive ongoing coverage of the Gaza solidarity encampment, ongoing negotiations between student representatives and school administrators over the protests, and the academic boycott of Columbia and Barnard, which more than 1,400 academics support. The campus radio station, WKCR is covering the protests live, and has been offering on-the-ground reporting […]
