Ryan Ruby Workers at HarperCollins are on strike and picketing the publisher’s offices in New York. HarperCollins union member Rachel Kambury tweeted a thread explaining the reasons for the strike and the union’s vision for workers at the company: “Let me reassure you that a strike isn’t something any of us union members are choosing to do lightly. This is our backed-into-a-corner, last-ditch-attempt to end a management-imposed stalemate and reach a deal that is meaningfully beneficial.” Elon Musk has emailed the company’s staff for the first time since his takeover, ending remote work and “days of rest,” and telling

R. O. Kwon. Photo: Smeeta Mahanti  On November 14, the National Book Critics Circle will host a panel on the craft of criticism by discussing four reviews of Margo Jefferson’s latest memoir, Constructing a Nervous System, with their authors. Critic and filmmaker Blair McClendon, who reviewed the book for Bookforum, is among the panelists.  For Parapraxis magazine, Maggie Doherty considers Emily Ogden’s new book of essays, On Not Knowing: How to Love and Other Essays. The book’s concern with care, Doherty writes, is “both interpersonal—how a parent cares for a child, how a therapist cares for a patient—and literary-critical: how

Annie Ernaux. Photo Catherine Hélie, Gallimard. Andrea Long Chu writes about the children’s book The Velveteen Rabbit as it reaches the one-hundredth anniversary of its publication. Writing that the author, Margery Williams Bianco, had something more philosophical in mind  than standard children’s fare, Long Chu writes, “The philosophical character of The Velveteen Rabbit, whose subtitle is How Toys Become Real, reflected Bianco’s abiding interest in the relationship between reality and the imagination.” The week’s New Yorker has a newly translated story by 2022 Nobel winner Annie Ernaux.   In her Substack newsletter, Not the Fun Kind, Moira Donegan considers the

Catherine Lacey. Photo: Willy Somma Catherine Lacey’s novel The Answers has been adapted for TV by Mother! director Darren Aronofsky, Sorry for Your Loss creator Kit Steinkellner, and Dopesick creator Danny Strong. Gillian Robespierre (A Teacher) will direct. The series has been commissioned by FX. On The Last Thing I Saw podcast, host Nicolas Rapold talks with critic Christian Lorentzen about director Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s White Noise. At The Atlantic, Jennifer Wilson reviews Percival Everett’s new spy novel Dr. No, “an experimental work of genre fiction nestled within a distinctly African American revenge tale.” The New

Joan Didion. Photo: Julian Wasser Brigitte Giraud has won the Goncourt Prize, France’s highest literary honor, for her book Vivre Vite (Living Fast). On November 16, property from the estate of Joan Didion will be auctioned off. You can peruse the auction catalogue—which includes listings such as “Group of five books about California” or “Group of thirteen blank notebooks”—online.  At Twitter, Elon Musk has begun laying off a reported 7,500 employees. On the site, former employees are sharing their stories and sending messages of support using the hashtag #OneTeam.    At the New Yorker, Kyle Chayka points out that “Twitter

Saidiya Hartman. Photo: © John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation For The Nation, Elias Rodriques interviews Saidiya Hartman on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary republication of her book Scenes of Subjection. Hartman discusses her unexpected path to writing the book: “I started out writing a dissertation on the blues. To understand that substrate of Black life, I began to research slavery. To my eyes, it was impossible to make sense of the structural logic and foundational character of racism without reckoning with slavery.” At the New Yorker, you can read an adapted version of Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor’s foreword

László Krasznahorkai. Photo: Nina Subin/New Directions The new issue of The Drift is online now, with Malcolm Harris on “ethical consumption under capitalism,” Tarpley Hitt on Hunter Biden, Noor Quasim on Annie Ernaux and “the millennial sex novel,” fiction by Percival Everett and others, an interview with Barbara Kruger, dispatches on the climate movement, and more.  For Astra magazine, Jared Marcel Pollen writes about two new books—Spadework for a Palace and A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East—by the Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai. Pollen compares Krasznahorkai’s work

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian Penguin Random House’s bid to acquire Simon Schuster has been blocked by a federal judge, who noted that the proposed merger would harm competition in the publishing market “substantially.” Penguin Random House plans to appeal the decision.  The nine winners of the 2022 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant have been announced. The Whiting Foundation has posted videos from the recipients describing their works in progress and created a digital chapbook explaining the projects.  n+1 has brought back Bookmatch, the personalized reading list service that picks ten books for you based on a short personality quiz. You can

H. D. Photo: Wikimedia Commons The Center for Fiction has a special exhibition of Beowulf Sheehan’s portraits of Cormac McCarthy, which will be on display until December 13. Poet Gerald Stern—whose This Time: New and Selected Poems won the National Book Award for poetry in 1998—has died at ninety-seven. In an obituary for the New York Times, Neil Genzlinger writes that Stern “drew on nature, history and his own experiences to write prizewinning poetry laced with wistfulness, anger and humor.”  George R. R. Martin says that Winds of Winter, the next Game of Thrones novel, will be more than

Percival Everett. Photo: Michael Avedon/Graywolf Press Elon Musk has completed the deal to buy Twitter he initiated back in April after quietly accumulating shares starting in January. Musk reportedly has plans to unsuspend permanently banned accounts, like that of Donald Trump, and has little interest in moderating content and disinformation. In his recent Bookforum review of Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou’s Speculative Communities, Max Read wrote about Musk’s chaotic takeover “strategy”: “He hasn’t been pursuing a clear program, laid out from the beginning in the manner of a mergers-and-acquisitions banker, but embracing confusion and volatility and changing circumstances in the manner of

Hua Hsu  For the New Yorker, Hua Hsu remembers historian and writer Mike Davis, who died this week at the age of seventy-six. Hsu pushes back against the idea that Davis was “a prophet of doom,” instead arguing that the Marxist intellectual was at heart an optimist, dreamer, and fearless truth-teller. Hsu writes, “His books were so prophetic about the nature of terror. We must also trust that he was right to have faith in the future—in those who followed.”   On Thursday, November 3, The Drift will celebrate the release of its eight issue with a party in Brooklyn.

Mike Davis. Photo: Wikimedia Commons Mike Davis, the activist, historian, and scholar, has died at age seventy-six. Jon Wiener, the coauthor of Davis’s latest book, offers a remembrance in The Nation. According to Wiener, “Mike hated being called ‘a prophet of doom.’ Yes, LA did explode two years after City of Quartz; the fires and floods did get more intense after Ecology of Fear, and of course a global pandemic did follow The Monster at Our Door. But when he wrote about climate change or viral pandemics, he was not offering a ‘prophecy’; he was reporting on the latest

Peter Schjeldahl. Photo: Ada Calhoun  Author, critic, and poet Peter Schjeldahl—whose books include Let’s See and Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light—has died at age eighty. The New Yorker has collected some of his signature pieces, including his essay from 2019, “The Art of Dying,” and David Remnick has written a remembrance. Yesterday, in his newsletter, Sasha Frere-Jones wrote, “I like The Hydrogen Jukebox but it’s not at all that important which collection you choose. Schjeldahl was relentlessly consistent. From his first column in the ‘70s on, you could not sell him a bill of goods or extinguish the love he

Bette Howland. Photo: Jacob Howland/A Public Space Online at n+1, Ava Kofman writes a remembrance of Bruno Latour, the French philosopher and sociologist who died earlier this month. “In a sense, Latour’s career was a matter of insisting that he meant most of the things he said, however unlikely they might sound,” Kofman writes. “Still, he occasionally found himself ‘squashed’ by the number of activities he’d thrown himself into. The CV he posted on his personal website was 112 pages long. His philosophical project didn’t lend itself to paraphrase, but one theme he returned to again and again was

Morgan Parker. Photo: Rachel Eliza Griffiths. For The Atlantic, Charlie Tyson looks at two new books—The Choreography Of Everyday Life by Annie-B Parson and Martha Graham: When Dance Became Modern by Neil Baldwin—to explain how dance and everyday movement inform each other. Writing about Parson, Tyson observes, “For her, dance is not a rarefied form. It is more like the natural, everyday motion of strolling down the street, which, after all, involves considerations of line, space, and tempo. City life, especially, requires dancelike coordination.” For more on Graham, see Claudia La Rocco’s review of Baldwin’s book in our current

Namwali Serpell. Photo: © Jordan Kines Photography On the New Yorker’s Page Turner blog, Jane Hu writes about Hilary Mantel’s double vision. Hu describes Mantel’s health issues and the way that these infirmities fed her writing process: “Writing enabled Mantel to locate herself in a body that felt increasingly alien. In the face of confusion and loss, she began to tell stories.”  In Gawker, a breakdown of how the new global news site Semafor is breaking down the news.  Sophie Haigney interviews Nancy Lemann for the Paris Review. Describing her first novel, The Lives of the Saints, Lemann says,

Shehan Karunatilaka Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka is the winner of the 2022 Booker Prize for fiction. You can watch the announcement on the Booker Prize YouTube channel.  LitHub has three short essays by poet Ross Gay. His new book of essays, Inciting Joy, will be published later this month. Gay contributed an essay to Bookforum’s summer issue on basketball, and took part in our video panel on sports and literature.  For Slate, Imogen West-Knights reports from a Gone Girl–themed cruise: “While I was on the boat, people at home texted me with concern, as though

Manuel Muñoz This week, on his Substack “Story Club,” George Saunders will be leading a discussion of Manuel Muñoz’s “Anyone Can Do It,” which appears in his story collection The Consequences, out from Graywolf Press this week. In addition to Saunders’s discussion, Muñoz will drop in to answer some reader questions.  Sadie Stein has been hired as the preview editor at the New York Times Book Review. A longtime contributor, Stein has also worked at Jezebel and the Paris Review. According to the paper’s announcement of Stein’s new position: “Preview editors must read hundreds of unreleased books each year

Serge Daney. Photo: Jean-Paul Fargier/Wikimedia Commons The T. S. Eliot Prize has announced its shortlist of ten new poetry collections. The winner will be announced in January.  Printed Matter’s 2022 NY Art Book Fair started yesterday and will continue all weekend on 22nd Street in Manhattan. The fair has a full slate of events, special projects, and programs, including a free block party on Saturday. The exhibitors include galleries, magazines, booksellers, artists, collectives, and more.  Los Angeles’s Mezzanine film series is hosting a tribute to the French film critic Serge Daney on Sunday. Ticketholders will receive a zine by

Kiese Laymon In the New York Times Magazine, Ismail Muhammad asks, “Can Black Literature Escape the Representation Trap?” Looking at recent fiction, and considering the debates about Black representation in literature stretching back to Baldwin, Wright, Hurston, and Morrison, Muhammad defines the stakes and limits of representation in literature, writing: “This is representation’s trap—the whittling down of Black life’s full scope into marketable, digestible facsimiles that are then thrust onto Black writers.”  The 2022 MacArthur Fellows have been announced.  In a preview of the new issue of The Drift, Noor Qasim writes about Annie Ernaux and the millennial sex