Pulitzer Prize–winning author Heather Ann Thompson is in the midst of a lawsuit to keep New York prisons from banning her book on the 1971 Attica prison revolt. The state attorney general’s office has proposed dismissing the suit, as prison officials have decided to lift the ban under the condition that two pages of Blood in the Water, which display a map of the prison, will be excised before reaching incarcerated readers. Thompson has noted that censorship at Attica by correctional officers was one of the factors that sparked the 1971 uprising.  

Stephen King has testified in the antitrust

At Lit Hub, an excerpt from Michelle Tea’s Knocking Myself Up: A Memoir of My (In)Fertility, which was just published by Dey Street Books. Tea writes, “Although my friends’ anti-baby fears gave me the opportunity to try out my pro-baby arguments, the truth was, the dare to depart in this wild new direction existed inside my body alongside self-doubt, the economic scarcity issues that were my birthright, and basic terror of the unknown.” 

At The Baffler, Rhian Sasseen considers the late Japanese sci-fi writer Izumi Suzuki, whose stories appear for the first time in English in the recent collection

Thomas Nelson Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Christian publishing, is releasing a new memoir by US Senator Tim Scott, America, a Redemption Story, on August 9. The copyright page states that the South Carolina Republican is preparing a presidential bid for the 2024 election. The publisher is now saying that Scott did not sign off on this declaration, and that printing it was a mistake. “The description on the copyright page was our error and is not accurate. It was not done at the direction or approval of the Senator or his team. We are working to correct this immediately,” a spokesperson

Gilbert Cruz, the Culture editor of the New York Times, will be the paper’s next Books editor, succeeding Pamela Paul. In a press release, the Times announced that Cruz will work to “reimagine The New York Times Book Review, the nation’s last stand-alone newspaper book-review section, for the digital age.” 

Art in America’s second annual Summer Reading issue is out now, with Jackson Arn on artist biographies, Hannah Stamler on children’s books by artists, Lucy Ives on indie presses and self-publishing projects, and more. 

Lincoln Michel has started a Twitter thread of resources for the business

The Robert B. Silvers Foundation has announced the recipients of its 2022 grants. The winners include Hannah Zeavin, Christian Lorentzen, Damion Searls, Stephen F. Kearse, and Urmila Seshagiri, among others.

For the Verso Books blog, Francesca Peacock writes about the politics of Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg: “Given Ginzburg’s life-long saturation in left-wing politics, why is it now so easy to read her fiction entirely divorced from this context? Part of the reason lies with Ginzburg herself: in her writing, she was unfailingly self-deprecating about her own political knowledge.” For more

Yale has announced the finalists of this year’s Frederick Douglass Book Prize, which recognizes outstanding books “on slavery, resistance, and/or abolition.” The finalists are Tiya Miles’s All That She Carried, Jennifer L. Morgan’s Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic, and Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh’s The Souls of Womenfolk. 

For the New Republic, Scott Bradfield writes about Frank O’Hara’s circle and the joyous nonchalance of his poetry, and considers Ada Calhoun’s Also a Poet. Calhoun’s new book is part biography and part memoir, and is about O’Hara

The Booker Prize longlist of thirteen writers has been announced. The shortlist will be released on September 6, with the final award given on October 17.

Barack Obama has tweeted his summer reading list. The former president has been reading Jennifer Egan, Emily St. John Mandel, Ezra Klein, Hanif Abdurraqib, and more.  

At the Los Angeles Times, Sam Dean interviews historian and activist Mike Davis about his life and career. Davis, the author of more than a dozen books, has terminal esophageal cancer. He told Dean, “I’m just extraordinarily furious and angry. If I have a regret, it’s not

The US Department of Justice is going to court in an attempt to block Penguin Random House’s attempt to acquire its rival publisher Simon & Schuster, calling the consolidation a violation of antitrust laws. Oral arguments will begin on August 1.

Penguin Random House has purchased Michelle Obama’s The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times, which will be published by the Crown imprint on November 15. According to the publisher, the book, which will have a first printing of 2.75 million copies, is “a series of fresh stories and insightful reflections on change, challenge, and power,” in

For the New Yorker, Molly Fischer revisits Susan Faludi’s 1991 feminist text Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. Fischer writes, “In the early nineties, Faludi situated the backlash within an ongoing cycle of feminist boom and bust in American history: periods of reactionary hostility toward feminism followed periods of widespread embrace.”  

In her The Present Age newsletter, Parker Molloy looks at Issac Chotiner’s New Yorker interview with Alan Dershowitz. Molloy admires how Chotiner fact-checks some of the Dershowitz's claims in the text itself. She observes that this is

The New York Times profiles Hell Gate, a New York City news site that is owned by the journalists who work there. Founded in 2021 by veterans of publications like Gothamist, the Village Voice, and Jezebel, Hell Gate is dedicated to “that thing every New Yorker has passed walking down the street, that fleeting, only-in-New-York moment that everyone wonders about but doesn’t understand.”  

Dana Canedy, a senior vice president and publisher at Simon & Schuster is leaving the company. Canedy will be working on a sequel to her memoir, A Journal for Jordan, which S&S is planning to publish. Canedy

On NPR’s All Things Considered, Jamil Jan Kochai discusses his new story collection, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and other Stories. 

For Columbia Journalism Review, Karen Maniraho talks to five reporters about covering life online. Ryan Broderick, author of the Garbage Day newsletter about web culture, tells Maniraho, “Of the tech-culture reporters I’ve spoken to over the last couple of years, we’ve all said that every story feels like this Russian nesting doll of weird specializations.”

The HarperCollins Union went on strike today.

Lindsay Zoladz has announced that she’s sold her first

At the New York Times, a roundup of eighty-eight books to read this summer, including picks in sports, music, travel, romance, cooking, and more.  

For Harper’s Magazine, Christian Lorentzen revisits the work of Christopher Hitchens as a new collection of his writing for the London Review of Books has just been published. Lorentzen observes that Hitchens’s “reputation is now weighted toward the work of his last decade—the turn right, the God bashing, and the public succumbing to cancer. It was during this era that he became a celebrity.” But, he writes, A Hitch In Time shows that his strongest