John Barth John Barth has died at the age of ninety-three. Barth was the author of more than twenty books of fiction and essays and a writing professor at Johns Hopkins, Penn State, SUNY Buffalo, and Boston University. The Paris Review has unpaywalled his 1985 “Art of Fiction” interview with George Plimpton. Reflecting on his time in the library stacks as a Johns Hopkins student, Barth tells Plimpton,  “I was impressed forever with the width as well as the depth of literature—just what a kid from the sticks, from the swamp, in my case, needed.”   On Saturday, April 13th, at 6 pm, the People’s Forum in New York City will host a fundraiser for the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund.

Maryse Condé. Photo: Columbia University  The Guadeloupean novelist, activist, and academic Maryse Condé has died at the age of ninety. Condé was the author of over twenty books including the multigenerational saga Segu. Her work was nominated twice for the International Booker Prize, and in 2018 she received the New Academy prize, a one-off award given in lieu of the Nobel that year.  “As a toddler she had caused a sensation in her family when she announced she wanted to live in a little hole like the ant. Not an ant, the ant. This might have been misheard.” Read

Ross Perlin. Photo: Cecil Howell In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Melina Moe reads some of Toni Morrison’s rejection letters to authors from her time as an editor at Random House. Moe writes, “Morrison’s letters are unexpectedly forthcoming. Often, she supplements her rejections with diagnoses of an ailing publishing business, growing frustrations with unimaginative taste, the industry’s aversion to risk-taking, and her own sense of creative constraint working at a commercial press.” On March 17, n+1 is hosting an event in its Brooklyn office. Ross Perlin will discuss his new book, Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered

Percival Everett. Photo: Michael Avedon For the Cleveland Review of Books, Mark Twain scholar Matt Seybold reviews Percival Everett’s new novel James, a retelling of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim: “James has locked Huck in a forever embrace, their destinies indissoluble. It reminds me of Baldwin’s prophecy: Race in the US must become either an embrace of lovers, prepared to ‘dare everything’ in order to ‘change the history of the world’ (‘Call it progress,’ Everett’s James says) or, like two boxers in a permanent clinch, we wait for ‘cosmic vengeance,’ looking each other in the

Becca Rothfeld Bookforum contributor and Washington Post nonfiction book critic Becca Rothfeld discusses fairness and perspective in criticism and her forthcoming essay collection All Things Are Too Small in an interview with Nicholas Russell for Defector.  For her contribution to the Yale Review’s “Objects of Desire” column, Leslie Jamison writes about “a gift from my aunt: a heavy wooden box full of hundred-year-old microscope slides she had unearthed in a London antique shop.” At Vulture, James Yeh reviews Percival Everett’s new novel James, which reimagines Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim: “It’s in keeping

Sally Rooney. Photo: Macmillan  In an opinion piece for the Irish Times, novelist Sally Rooney writes about how President Biden’s friendly visit with Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar this weekend “neatly illustrates the Irish Government’s approach to the war on Gaza.” Rooney describes how the Irish government reserves “strong straightforward criticism” for the state of Israel while treating the United States “as a kind of neutral third party,” despite the fact that the US supplies around 80 percent of Israel’s imported weapons in addition to billions of dollars of aid. “What is happening in Gaza is not only Israel’s

Vinson Cunningham. Photo: Jane Bruce. The UK–based Women’s Prize for Fiction has announced its 2024 longlist, which includes Maya Binyam’s Hangman, Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost, Chetna Maroo’s Western Lane, and more. Tonight, Vinson Cunningham will discuss his new novel Great Expectations with  Doreen St. Felix at Greenlight Books in Brooklyn. Recently, Cunningham discussed his not-very-Dickensian book about coming of age as a staffer on the first Obama campaign with David Remnick, recalling that the title first came up as a joke from a colleague. Cunningham says of Obama’s role in public life after his presidency: “I will admit that

Rachel Cusk. Photo: Siemon Scamell-Katz Online at n+1, Erik Baker writes about Aaron Bushnell, the US’s illegal use of incendiary weapons on civilians, and the history of self-immolation as protest. “The purpose of lighting yourself on fire is not to encourage other people to light themselves on fire. It is to scream to the world that you could find no alternative, and in that respect it is a challenge to the rest of us to prove with our own freedom that there are other ways to meaningfully resist a society whose cruelty has become intolerable.” PEN America has announced

Fady Joudah. Photo: Cybelle Knowles. In the Yale Review, Aria Aber interviews poet Fady Joudah. Joudah wrote his latest book,  […], in about ten weeks beginning in October 2023. He tells Aber, “Palestinians are much more than a repository of wounds; portraying us as such can’t lead to much more than pity.”  On the Verso Books blog, Katie Tobin writes about Simone Weil, the Catholic mystic Marxist philosopher and author who died at age thirty-four in 1943. Weil has seen a resurgence lately, featuring prominently in Jacqueline Rose’s recent book The Plague, Octavia Bright’s memoir This Ragged Grace, and

Carson McCullers: Photo: Carl Van Vechten, 1959 Maggie Doherty reviews Mary V. Dearborn’s biography of Carson McCullers, author of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, for the New Yorker: “A child in life, McCullers probed the emotional complexities of youth in her fiction. She is one of the great writers of American girlhood, someone who might be mentioned in the same breath as Louisa May Alcott and Judy Blume. But she was not a sentimentalist, or a young-adult author; rather, she used the techniques of literary modernism to depict the world as the child sees it, producing sophisticated works

Sloane Crosley. Photo: Jennifer Linvingston Next Monday at Books Are Magic in Brooklyn Heights, novelist and essayist Sloane Crosley will discuss her new book Grief Is for People with Sigrid Nunez. The book is a memoir about Crosley losing her best friend to suicide.  Read an excerpt from Bookforum contributor Becca Rothfeld’s debut essay collection, All Things Are Too Small, in the New Yorker. Discussing David Cronenberg’s body-horror films, sex, and the “interhuman,” Rothfeld writes: “Cronenberg must resort to drastic tactics if he is to remind his audience to want what the civilized world is bent on neutering, and

Sophie Pinkham Tricia Romano, whose oral history of the legendary alt-weekly the Village Voice is out now, has written a remembrance of writer and editor Joe Wood, who wrote for the paper and many other publications before his disappearance in 1999. “He was on a public intellectual, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Stanley Crouch type of path,” says Colson Whitehead, who worked for VLS, the Voice’s literary supplement, before he went on to become a Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist. “It was always much more serious than the stuff I felt I was doing and admirable in that way.” On Friday at 6:30, the New

Medaya Ocher  Medaya Ocher has been named the new editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books. Previously, Ocher was the managing editor and senior editor at LARB, and currently hosts the magazine’s podcast.  In a preview from the forthcoming issue of The Drift, Julia Rock profiles Norman Finkelstein, the political scientist, longtime anti-Zionist, and author of the influential and controversial 2000 book The Holocaust Industry. “Finkelstein remains most comfortable on the margins,” Rock writes. “Ideologically aligned with a left that won’t always have him, platformed by a right that won’t always listen, and insulting them both.”  Over 600

Billy Childish, cave, light and island, 2020, oil and charcoal on linen, 96 × 60″. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London. Photo: Rikard Osterlund. The Winter 2024 issue of Bookforum is online now! Subscribe today to get the print edition as soon as possible, and donate here to support what we do.  The Center for Fiction and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop are hosting a discussion of Diane Oliver’s posthumously published short story collection, Neighbors. The February 21 event with guests Jamel Brinkley, Lan Samantha Chang, and Dawnie Walton will also be

Andrea Long Chu. Photo: New York Magazine. In the first episode of a new podcast, The Critic and Her Publics, Merve Emre talks to Andrea Long Chu. LitHub is partnering with the New York Review of Books to publish transcripts of the discussions, which are taken from a lecture series hosted by Emre at Wesleyan University. As part of the event, Emre invited Chu to perform a bit of criticism on the spot: a response to Zoe Leonard’s 1992 textual artwork “I want a president.”  For the Paris Review Daily, Emmeline Clein visits the Kentwood Historical and Cultural Museum,

N. Scott Momaday The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and novelist N. Scott Momaday died last week at the age of eighty-nine. His debut novel House Made of Dawn, published in 1968, was one of the first novels published by a Native American writer about Native American life, and has been called the harbinger of the Native American Renaissance. Momaday considered himself primarily a poet. In his 2022 “Art of Poetry” interview (currently unpaywalled), he told the Paris Review: “Part of the process is living with a poem for some time before you know what it is. It’s best to recognize

Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. Photo: Alex M. Philip.  The National Book Critics Circle has announced its 2023 award finalists. In addition to the five finalists in six categories, Becca Rothfeld won the 2023 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, Judy Blume received the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, and American Library Association took home the Toni Morrison Achievement Award. The winners will be announced on March 21 in New York. Tonight at Word Up bookstore in New York, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah will discuss his latest novel, Chain Gang All Stars, with Roxane Gay. Fragile Juggernaut is a new podcast about

Greil Marcus. Photo: Ida Lødemel Tvedt Unionized workers across several Conde Nast publications are walking out today in protest of “the unlawful handling of layoff negotiations and bad-faith bargaining.” Over 400 workers are holding a work stoppage and rally today, and asking readers to respect a digital picket line of GQ, Vanity Fair, Bon Appétit, Vogue, and other publications. For the latest issue of the Yale Review, Greil Marcus considers “Why I Write” and what criticism means to him. For Marcus, it started with reviewing the Rolling Stones album Let It Bleed in 1969: “Why am I reacting to

Leslie Jamison. Photo: Grace Ann Leadbeater Leslie Jamison is beginning her book tour for Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story next month at the Center for Fiction with a launch event on February 20 featuring Mary Karr. An essay adapted from the book, “The Birth of My Daughter, the Death of My Marriage,” recently appeared in the New Yorker.  More author events: Amitava Kumar will launch his new novel, My Beloved Life, on February 26, at McNally Jackson’s Seaport location, in a conversation with Stay True author Hua Hsu. Wine will be served afterward. At the Cleveland Review of

Sharif Abdel Kouddous. Photo: Chion Wolf. Democracy Now! reports on “Israel’s War on Journalists,” with the Committee to Protect Journalists’ preliminary report finding at least eighty-three journalists killed so far in the Isreal-Gaza war. Amy Goodman speaks with CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa coordinator Sherif Mansour as well as Democracy Now! correspondent Sharif Abdel Kouddous.  Condé Nast is laying off Pitchfork staff, including editor-in-chief Puja Patel, as it folds the venerable music site into GQ magazine. The move was widely criticized online, with New Yorker staff writer Amanda Petrusich tweeting, “Feels like a death knell for the record