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

Texas Monthly has published a package of articles that offer “ten reasons to believe we’re living in the golden age of Texas fiction.” Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, suggests that a “new wave” of writers is confronting the Lone Star State’s bloody history and “Anglo triumphalism.” Other articles highlight the state’s deeply gothic settings, Gabino Iglesias’s new horror novel The Devil Takes You Home, and the fiction of LaToya Watkins, whose debut novel, Perish, will be released next month. 

Civitella Renieri has announced its new writing fellows, who include Hua Hsu,

Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel has posted a video of a recent event at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn: a conversation between Paisley Currah and Andrea Long Chu on Currah’s new book, Sex Is as Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity. 

At Vulture, a roundup of the best books of 2022 so far. Some of the picks include Sheila Heti’s Pure Colour,  Dan Charnas’s Dilla Time, and Olga Ravn’s The Employees. 

Roger Hodge has been named the acting editor-in-chief for The Intercept. Betsy Reed, the former EIC, left to become the editor of the Guardian US.  

At The Nation, Ilan Stavans looks at the

For T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Sigrid Nunez writes about Paula Fox’s 1970 novel Desperate Characters. It begins with Sophie Bentwood being bitten by a stray—and possibly rabid—cat; readers are “kept in suspense,” Nunez writes, as to “why Sophie, an intelligent and educated woman, would rather deny the problem, even as her hand swells and throbs, than seek medical advice.” After reading the novel in 1991, Nunez recommended it to Jonathan Franzen, who helped bring about the 1999 reissue. Fox, who also published over twenty books for children, reflected on her newfound popularity in