• Jessica Winter. Photo: Adrian Kinloch
    March 09, 2021

    Women reporters of the Vietnam War; Jessica Winter’s new novel

    At The Atlantic, George Packer reviews a new book about women reporters in Vietnam. Elizabeth Becker’s You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War covers the work of reporters Frances FitzGerald and Kate Webb, and photographer Catherine Leroy. Packer writes of FitzGerald, a twenty-something Radcliffe graduate and daughter of a CIA official: “Sheltered all her life, she was profoundly shocked by the suffering of the Vietnamese—not just the death, injury, and displacement, but the loss of identity under the crushing weight of the Americans.”

    In the new issue of Columbia

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  • Cathy Park Hong
    March 08, 2021

    New inductees to the American Academy of Arts and Letters; Cathy Park Hong in conversation with Charles Yu

    In an effort to make its membership more diverse, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, once made up almost entirely of Christian white men, is increasing the number of inductees for the first time since 1908. “We’re expanding the membership so that it is more clearly representative of this country,” says the academy’s president, architect Billie Tsien. “Also, it’s a matter of numbers. When the academy was first established, the population was much smaller. Now there are more people, and more kinds of people.” New writers who have been inducted this year include US poet laureate Joy Harjo,

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  • Emily Nemens. Photo: James Emmerman
    March 05, 2021

    Emily Nemens steps down from the Paris Review; TV adaptation of Torrey Peters’s novel Detransition, Baby

    Emily Nemens has resigned from her position as editor of the Paris Review to work on her second novel. In a note published on the magazine’s website, Nemens writes: “Hopefully, eventually, I’ll edit again—connecting writers to readers is among the world’s best professions.”

    Jewish Currents is launching an investigative fund with the Puffin Foundation. Journalists published by the fund will earn at least one dollar per word, and receive fact-checking and legal support. Jewish Currents is seeking pitches for stories that will attempt to “hold those in power accountable by investigating important

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  • Joy Williams. Photo: Penguin Random House
    March 04, 2021

    A new Joy Williams novel is coming this fall; David Brooks’s financial ties to Facebook

    David Brooks is leading an Aspen Institute project called Weave, a movement dedicated to “repairing our country’s social fabric, which is badly frayed by distrust, division and exclusion.” Weave is funded by Facebook and other large donors, but while Brooks has promoted the project in his columns for the New York Times and written about the social media giant, he has not disclosed his financial ties to them. When BuzzFeed News asked a Times spokesperson if they were aware of Brooks’s second salary, they declined to comment.

    Joy Williams is publishing her first novel in twenty years this fall.

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  • Hanif Abdurraqib. Photo: Megan Leigh Barnard
    March 03, 2021

    Yuka Igarashi to join Graywolf Press; Hanif Abdurraqib and Devonté Hynes in conversation

    Yuka Igarashi, the editor in chief of Soft Skull Press and founder of Catapult magazine, will join Graywolf as an executive editor in April. “We needed a fresh vision to shake us up a bit, and to help guide our talented rising editors,” said Graywolf publisher Fiona McCrae in a statement on the hire.

    At Hyperallergic, Cyndii Wilde Harris selects a few highlights—including interviews with Mamie Till Mobley and Angela Davis—from the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, which collects and preserves materials with the Library of Congress and GBH Boston.

    In the premier episode of a new video

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  • Terry Castle
    March 02, 2021

    Terry Castle on Patricia Highsmith; New books by Hanif Abdurraqib

    For the London Review of Books, Terry Castle writes about a new “unsavory” biography of Patricia Highsmith, which Castle tried to finish during the January 6 mob assault on the US capitol: “The same ugly question kept intruding: would house-wrecker Highsmith – everyone’s favourite mess-with-your-head morbid misanthrope – have relished the day’s cascading idiocy?” For more Castle on Highsmith, see Bookforum’s Summer 2016 issue, in which Castle wrote about Todd Haynes’s Carol, based on Highsmith’s 1952 lesbian-romance-thriller, The Price of Salt: “It’s a commonplace that this [novel] is ‘different’

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  • Parul Sehgal. Photo: Beowulf Sheehan
    March 01, 2021

    Parul Sehgal reviews the New York Times Book Review

    Astra publishing house is launching a new literary magazine. Astra Quarterly will “have a strong international focus” and an “international network of editors.” Nadja Spiegelman, former online editor of the Paris Review and author of the memoir I’m Supposed to Protect You from All This, will be the editor in chief. According to Spiegelman: “I am delighted to join the Astra team in its deep desire to uphold voices across borders. The new generation of readers—from New York to Lagos, Paris to Shanghai, Mexico City to Berlin—has more in common than ever before. We hope to show audiences that

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  • Christine Smallwood. Photo: New York Institute for the Humanities
    February 26, 2021

    Jia Tolentino reviews Christine Smallwood’s debut novel; Lovia Gyarkye on bookstores and curation

    A new study surveying journalists from Virginia, Missouri, Arizona, and Texas alongside published coverage of anti-racism protests in those states between 2018 and 2019 shows gaps “between how journalists thought they covered protests, and actual published protest coverage.” Summer Harlow, one of the researchers behind the study, breaks down how mainstream news can delegitimize social movements.

    For Columbia Journalism Review, Akintunde Ahmad interviews Michael Tubbs, the former mayor of Stockton, California, about governing in a news desert. Tubbs was the target of a disinformation campaign

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  • Laura Poitras. Photo: Katy Scoggin
    February 25, 2021

    The story behind Laura Poitras’s departure from First Look Media; Killing the book blurb

    At New York magazine’s Intelligencer, Sarah Jones and Peter Sterne take an in-depth look at why Laura Poitras left First Look Media, the independent media company she cofounded with Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, and Laura Poitras.

    At The Nation, Jennifer Wilson reviews Elena Ferrante’s newest novel, The Lying Life of Adults, and considers how class plays out in the Italian author’s work. It’s usually an uneasy proposition, as the characters contend with conflicted feelings about their upbringing, as Wilson writes, “The Lying Life of Adults lives in the emotionally fraught distance between

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  • Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Photo: Elsa Dorfman
    February 24, 2021

    Book publishing’s reckoning with race; Remembering Lawrence Ferlinghetti

    Lila Shapiro talks with nine top publishing executives hired amid the industry’s reckoning with its longstanding whiteness about their hopes and expectations for their new roles. Lisa Lucas, formerly of the National Book Foundation, would like to rethink how entry-level staff are compensated at Pantheon and Schocken Books. Jamia Wilson, formerly of Feminist Press, will focus on equity and inclusion on Random House’s list in part by “having people who represent the fullness and diversity of who we are, at all different levels of decision-making.”

    Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Beat poet and cofounder

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  • Emily Greenhouse. Photo: New York Review of Books
    February 23, 2021

    Emily Greenhouse has been named editor of the New York Review of Books; Q&A with Sonia Sanchez

    Emily Greenhouse has been named editor of the New York Review of Books, and her colleagues Jana Prikryl, Daniel Drake, and Maya Chung will also take on new roles.

    LitHub has a helpful—and very detailed—explainer of the memes mentioned in Patricia Lockwood’s new novel, No One Is Talking About This (there are more than fifty memes covered). If you understand why the eels of London are are on cocaine but are still wondering why “sneaze” is funnier than “sneeze,” see Audrey Wollen’s essay on the book in the forthcoming issue of Bookforum.

    Maggie Doherty reviews Paulina Bren’s new book on the

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  • Victor LaValle. Photo: Teddy Wolff
    February 22, 2021

    Victor LaValle’s new comic-book series

    Boom Studios has announced that it will publish a new comic by novelist Victor LaValle (Big Machine, The Changeling, and The Devil in Silver) and artist Jo Mi-Gyeong. Eve, a five-issue series, will be released in May. Says LaValle: “What kind of planet are we leaving to our kids? This is the question that spawned my comic book. It’s an old one, of course. Many generations have wrestled with it, but the question has never been as immediate. But I didn’t want to write some grim story about how this joint went to hell. Instead, I wanted to write a story about how we let the planet fall apart and

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