At Jewish Currents, Haley Mlotek talks with composer Ethan Philbrick and writer Torrey Peters about what divorce has meant for their work. Philbrick belongs to The Gay Divorcees, a musical ensemble of nine “real-life queers who got gay married and gay divorced,” and Peters is the author of the novel Detransition, Baby, which she wrote following her own divorce. For Peters, reading books by cis women about divorce helped her identify the audience she wanted to write her novel for: “I was like, ‘There’s a way of seeing the world that these women seem to have.’ Which was: to take stock of yourself,

Today would have been Toni Morrison’s ninetieth birthday. To celebrate, the New York Times offers guidance on which Morrison books to start with. At Colorlines, author and professor Obery Hendricks remembers Morrison, a friend since the two met in the 1990s at Princeton: “Toni was an international figure fully astride every literary stage of significance and knew it, but other than using her fame as leverage to help others, Toni wore that fame very lightly.” For more Morrison, check out her 2013 appearance at the New York Public Library with Junot Díaz.

Roxane Gay will teach an online MasterClass

The publisher of the Chicago Tribune and the Daily News—Tribune Publishing—has agreed to give Alden Global Capital full ownership of the company. Alden has a history of dramatically cutting costs at the papers under its control, and has been pursuing ownership of Tribune, of which it is already a 32 percent stakeholder, for years. In the New York Times, Marc Tracy indicates the magnitude of the deal: “The combination of Tribune and MediaNews Group, an Alden-controlled chain of roughly 100 newspapers, including more than 60 dailies, would put another significant chunk of newspaper publishing

French publisher Gallimard has announced a new book of unseen work by Marcel Proust, Les Soixante-quinze feuillets (The Seventy-Five Pages). The manuscript, written in 1908, is said to shed light on the author’s masterwork, In Search of Lost Time, and was discovered in the archives of publisher Bernard de Fallois. Gallimard is calling the discovery a “thunderclap” and promises that the book is a “Proustian grail.”

At Hazlitt, an interview with Jeremy Atherton Lin, author of Gay Bar: Why We Went Out: “I think a lot of people who are younger than myself presumed that I was working on a project

If the original Congressional Commission had been present for Trump’s second impeachment, writes David Remnick at the New Yorker, it probably would have, like the majority of Republicans in the Senate, voted to acquit. “But history—history as it is assembled through the rigorous accumulation and analysis of fact—will not be so forgiving….” At The Atlantic, Trumpocalypse author David Frum writes of the acquittal: “You say that you are disappointed? That a mere rebuke was not enough? That justice was not done? It wasn’t. But now see the world from the other side, through the eyes of those who

New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet has responded to criticism of the paper’s recent statement announcing reporter Donald McNeil’s resignation following a Daily Beast story revealing his use of a racial slur. Baquet and managing editor Joe Kahn told staff that the paper does not “tolerate racist language regardless of intent.” Baquet has since clarified: “Of course intent matters when we are talking about language in journalism.”

Paula Mejía remembers her former professor and celebrated fiction writer H. G. Carrillo, who, after his death from COVID-19 in April, was revealed to have

A profile of Patricia Lockwood, whose new book, No One is Talking About This, comes out on Tuesday. Of the novel, Lockwood says, “I was trying to write an atmosphere. I was trying to write something . . . that is pre-language, that is just instinct and that’s awareness of what the herd is doing around you.”

Ruth Dickey has been named the executive director of the National Book foundation. Dickey, a poet and director of Seattle Arts & Lectures, told the New York Times: “As a queer kid growing up in a small town, books brought me the world.”

The Times’s morning newsletter has reached 1 billion

At the London Review of Books, Patricia Lockwood reviews Elena Ferrante’s latest novel, The Lying Life of Adults, and outlines the terms of being one of her devoted readers: “Ferrante is yours not when you love all of her books without exception, but when you hate a few of them irrationally, almost as enemies of your happiness.” For example, Lockwood despises Giovanna, the protagonist of Ferrante’s latest novel, on sight. “It is a gift,” Lockwood writes, “to be capable of inducing this physical irritation with fictional bodies, movements, motives; to make a reader want to pinch a character just

In The Atlantic, Clint Smith has an in-depth essay on the descendants of people who were interviewed for the Federal Writers’ Project slave narratives, which documented the stories of more than two thousand former slaves in the late 1930s. Smith writes, “The descendants of those who were interviewed for the Federal Writers’ Project have been given something that has been denied to so many Black Americans: the opportunity to read the words, and possibly see the faces, of people they thought had been lost to history.”

At The Nation, Micah Uetricht looks at the long arc of social critic and

The publication date for Amanda Gorman’s inaugural poem, The Hill We Climb, was originally April 27, but Penguin Random House has announced that it now plans to release the book on March 16. The edition will come with an introduction by Oprah Winfrey.

At the Letters page at the New York Review of Books, Rumaan Alam writes that while he is “delighted” by the publication’s decision to cover his latest novel, Leave the World Behind, he is “troubled by the methods” used by the reviewer, Ruth Franklin. “I can’t see what’s gained, in a review, by noting the name of my husband, except that it clarifies

Gallery Books, a Simon & Schuster imprint, has announced that it will publish Hunter Biden’s memoir, Beautiful Things, in April. The book was written with Drew Jubera, and according to the publisher, as Alexandra Alter reports, “will be more of a personal narrative about addiction and recovery than a political memoir.”

At Columbia Journalism Review, Jon Allsop recounts how Indian authorities have cracked down on social media and individual members of the media amid the farmers’ protests. Last Tuesday, Navreet Singh, a twenty-five-year-old farmer, was killed during a protest. The official line

After seeing digital revenue surpass print revenue last year, the New York Times exceeded 7.5 million print and digital subscriptions in 2020, even as ad revenue declined.

New Yorker staff writer Vinson Cunningham has announced that his debut novel, The Party Year, has been sold to Hogarth. Cunningham is also working on a book about R&B.

Freelance writer Dean Sterling Jones has accused The Atlantic of using his work without giving him credit or payment. Jones was cited as a source for an article about Maria Butina’s legal bills, but Jones is claiming that the magazine used some of the exact