At the New York Review of Books, Salamishah Tillet interviews painter Jordan Casteel about her large-scale oil portraits and the importance of scale in her work: “I was thinking about the way that Black male bodies have existed in the visual and historical realms in the Americas, and how they’ve been villainized, made to feel small, disrespected. I just wanted to give them as much room as possible.”

Scott Donaldson, biographer of Ernest Hemingway, John Cheever, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, has died at the age of ninety-two. He also wrote a book on the difficulty of writing biographies, which

Zhang Zhan, a citizen journalist working in China, has been sentenced to four years in prison for COVID reporting that challenged the government and contradicted the official account of the outbreak in Wuhan.

At the New Republic, Alexander Chee reviews two novels that imagine a post-internet future: Don Delillo’s The Silence and Jonathan Lethem’s The Arrest. Chee writes, “Both feel like revenge fantasies on social media and electronic connectedness. They arrive not so much as oracles as scolds. They may not offer a guide to the future, but to the present.”

The Intercept reports on how the

The Committee to Protect Journalists has issued a demand that Cuban authorities stop harassing reporter Carlos Manuel Álvarez, who is the director of the Cuban online literary journalism magazine El Estornudo, a contributor to El País, and the author of the novel The Fallen, which was released in English translation by Graywolf in June. Over the past month, Álvarez has been detained, held under house arrest, and assaulted by security agents, all in retribution for his support of the San Isidro movement in Cuba.

Writer Barry Lopez has died. His books include the National Book Award–winner Arctic

At Vanity Fair, a report on Marty Baron’s impending retirement. Baron has been editor of the Washington Post since 2012. Sources at the paper expect him to step down in the coming year, but not before staffers return to the office.

The Kansas City Star has published a lengthy apology for the paper’s history, writing that the publication has “disenfranchised, ignored and scorned generations of Black Kansas Citians.” Conversations within the newsroom led the paper to take a hard look at the ways in which the Black community has been covered in the paper, dating back to 1880. The paper has just

The New York Times reports on an international scam that is tricking writers, editors, and agents into sending their unpublished manuscripts. So far, it is unclear what the scammers are doing with the drafts. Catherine Eccles, the owner of a literary talent agency in London, told the Times: “They know who our clients are, they know how we interact with our clients, where sub-agents fit in and where primary agents fit in. They’re very, very good.”

The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research is offering a Proust-themed gift card. Courses in early 2021 include an introduction to Frantz Fanon, a

Pantheon has announced that it will publish a new book by Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, his first novel in forty-eight years. Set in an “imaginary Nigeria,” Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth, which will be released on September 28, 2021, is “at once a savagely witty whodunit and a corrosively satirical examination of corruption, both personal and political.”

In an opinion piece at the New York Times, poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong (author of, most recently, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning) writes about right-wing conspiracy theories that are reaching Asian

Authors and critics, including Nadia Owusu, Sabrina Orah Mark, and Ayad Akhtar, share their year in reading at The Millions.

Takashi Oka, former Tokyo bureau chief of the New York Times and representative in Washington of Japan’s Liberal Party, has died at the age of ninety-six.

At the New York Review of Books, Batya Ungar-Sargon looks back at Benjamin Day’s New York Sun, the country’s first penny press, and popular journalism’s blue-collar origins: “More than promoting any particular ideology, the penny press made visible New Yorkers who weren’t people of means. Rather than shaping a particular

At the New York Times, a profile of Nikki Giovanni, the poet, children’s book author, and nonfiction writer with over thirty books to her credit. Looking back at her career, Giovanni says, “I thought 50 years ago that I could make a big difference in the world. What I know now is that I will not allow the world to make a big difference in me. That’s what’s incredibly important. I’m not going to let the fact that I live in a nation with a bunch of fools make a fool out of me.”

At the New Republic, Ryu Spaeth looks at the lengthy editor’s note attached this week to Elif Batuman’s 2018 New Yorker

In a raft of high-level promotions and restructuring at Condé Nast, Anna Wintour has been given two new titles: global editorial director of Vogue and worldwide chief content officer. As New York Times media reporter Edmund Lee notes, Wintour will now have “final say over publications in more than 30 markets around the world.”

The University of Mississippi has fired Garrett Felber, a tenure-track assistant professor and vocal scholar of Malcolm X, the American carceral state, and anti-racism, citing poor communication. In October, Felber took to Twitter to describe how the university rejected

Editor Gerald Howard looks back on the glory days of the American trade paperback. Howard worked at Penguin Books in the 1980s, when a productive rivalry with Vintage spurred a contemporary fiction boom: “There was a lot of fun to be had in publishing in those years by being ‘Contemporary.’ It was definitely a moment and people who worked in trade paperback in those years remember it fondly.”

At the Associated Press, Hillel Italie recaps a tumultuous year in publishing. As Simon & Schuster CEO Jonathan Karp puts it: “A lot of what has happened this year—if it were a novel, I would say that it

John le Carré—author of Cold War novels such The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy—has died. Le Carré, whose real name was David John Moore Cornwell, studied at Oxford, worked undercover for British intelligence, and created one of the best-known fictional spies of all time, George Smiley.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s final book, Justice, Justice Thou Shalt Pursue: A Life’s Work Fighting for a More Perfect Union, cowritten with Amanda L. Tyler, will be published by University of California Press in March.

The New York Times culture desk has announced that it has given

Friends, editors, and readers mourn the unexpected loss of fiction writer Anthony Veasna So, who died this week at age twenty-eight. So had published stories in n+1, the New Yorker, and Granta, and his debut collection, Afterparties, is forthcoming this summer.

At The Nation, Billie Allen writes about his friend Brandon Bernard, the ninth inmate to be executed since the Justice Department ended a seventeen-year moratorium on capital punishments in July. There are at least four more executions scheduled before Inauguration day. For more on Bernard’s case, see E. Tammy Kim’s New Yorker piece