In “Why We Can’t Stop Thinking About George Floyd’s Neck,” Soraya Nadia McDonald writes about the history of lynching, chokeholds, iron collars, and other state-sanctioned attacks on black Americans that target one of the body’s most vulnerable areas.

The May edition of Radical History Review, a special issue on “Policing, Justice, and the Radical Imagination,” is available online for free at the Duke University Press website.

Staffers from the New York Times are denouncing the paper’s decision to run “Send in the Troops,” an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton calling for the use of “overwhelming

The Brain Lair bookshop offers a list of essential anti-racist reading.

Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, joins Jonathan Capehart on his podcast Cape Up.

Elizabeth Hinton makes the case that “George Floyd’s Death is a Failure of Generations of Leadership,” detailing the history of policing policy from the 1960s to today. Hinton writes, “As we create a new future of policing, we should not fall back on the unsuccessful, top-down approaches of the past. Demonstrators today are calling for the restructuring of vital resources that

At the Los Angeles Times, LZ Granderson details the mental toll on black journalists of covering police violence—especially during a pandemic that is disportiantly killing people of color. John Eligon of the New York Times told Granderson: “It is getting very difficult to tell the stories of black people dying on an emotional level. People who look like me or family members of mine, and the practical weight that the police don’t see you as a journalist but as a black man in the street.” Suzette Hackney of the Indianapolis Star said, “I walked six miles today trying to beat back the sorrow and

Verso Books has made Alex S. Vitale’s 2017 The End of Policing free to download as an e-book on its website. In Vitale’s words: “The problem is not police training, police diversity, or police methods. The problem is the dramatic and unprecedented expansion and intensity of policing in the last forty years, a fundamental shift in the role of police in society. The problem is policing itself.” (For more from Vitale, see his new article in The Nation: “The Only Solution Is to Defund the Police.”)

Michael Robbins has been publishing new poems, from his forthcoming book Walkman, on Twitter: “I

Longtime Simon & Schuster publisher Jonathan Karp has been selected as the company’s president and CEO. Karp, who was previously the publisher and editor of Hachette imprint Twelve, succeeds Carolyn Reidy, who died earlier this month. “For 96 years, Simon & Schuster has been the gold standard for publishing books that satisfy and illuminate readers, and I am grateful for the opportunity to inherit this great legacy,” Karp said in a statement. “We will continue to build on the strong foundation that Carolyn Reidy and the leadership team have in place to publish books we believe in and love.”

Author, activist, and playwright Larry Kramer died yesterday at the age of eighty-four. A founder of ACT UP, Kramer was called “one of America’s most valuable troublemakers” by Susan Sontag. Anthony Fauci, who became friendly with Kramer after the author called him “a killer and ‘an incompetent idiot’” in a 1988 open letter, remembered Kramer contributions to the fight against the HIV epidemic. “Once you got past the rhetoric,” he said, “you found that Larry Kramer made a lot of sense, and that he had a heart of gold.”

For the New York Times, Li Yuan talks to Zero Point, Beijing author Chan

“There was some grief at the beginning over not being able to go out and celebrate, but that kind of dissipated because as unfortunate as this is, I have to remind myself that the whole point of writing a book is that books live very long lives,” C Pam Zhang told the Reading Women podcast about publishing a book during the coronavirus pandemic. “I’m honestly far more worried about the health of indie bookstores because they’ve always been hanging on by a thread, and it’s just really important to support them in this time.”

For the New York Times, Robin Pogrebin looks at the ways that artists,

Literary Hub has posted its Summer Books Preview for 2020. Highlights include Masha Gessen’s Surviving Autocracy, Megha Majumdar’s A Burning, and Patrick Hoffman’s Clean Hands.

At the Columbia Journalism Review, Lauren Harris reflects on the difficulty of reporting on COVID-19 and explains why journalists must work to contextualize expert information for readers. “It’s tempting for journalists to see themselves as outside observers. They are not. Reporters gather bits of information and cobble them together—superimposing narratives, culling expert voices, using semantic sleight-of-hand to show

“There are plenty of things to feel guilty about in life—yelling at your kid, not putting a shopping cart back in the parking lot, sleeping with your best friend’s spouse—why put that on reading? If I could absolve readers of one thing, it would be this—feeling guilt about books that they like, and books that they don’t,” Emma Straub tells Literary Hub. “Ditch the guilt! Embrace excitement, and glee, about all the books you still have to read for the very first time.”

The New York Times Book Review rounds up the best of the summer’s upcoming books.

The shortlists for the Orwell Prizes in

The nominees for this year’s AKO Caine Prize for African Writing were announced yesterday. Nominees include Erica Sugo Anyadike, Irenosen Okojie, and Jowhor Ile. The winner will be announced this fall.

Curtis Sittenfeld takes the Lit Hub Questionnaire. She says if she wasn’t a writer she would have wanted to become a doctor and hopes that female politicians like Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Kamala Harris will read her new novel, Rodham. “I’d love to know what they think I got right or wrong about women and politics.”

“I’ve plunged into a world of online bookishness over the past

The New York Public Library has announced the finalists for the 2020 Young Lions Fiction Award. The nominees are Bryan Washington’s Lot, Xuan Juliana Wang’s Home Remedies, Steph Cha’s Your House Will Pay, Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age, and Julia Phillips’s Disappearing Earth.

Sports writer Jeff Benedict is working on a new book about the New England Patriots. The Dynasty will be published by Avid Reader Press in September.

The Association of American Publishers has released data on book sales during March. While overall sales fell by 8 percent, audiobook sales rose by 15 percent and sales by

At Literary Hub, Maggie Doherty writes about the history of creative communities. “Writers and artists have often come together to create formal and informal communities. Some did so spontaneously; others worked through existing institutions; still others created institutions of their own,” she writes. “These creative communities mimicked the conditions of the MFA program and the artist colony: long stretches of alone time punctuated by intense, intimate gatherings.”

The New York Times’s Alexandra Alter looks at the publishing industry’s “quickly assembled” books on coronavirus that will be