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

Vivian Gornick. Photo: Mitchell Bach The Paris Review has announced that critic and memoirist Vivian Gornick will receive the 2023 Hadada Award, the journal’s lifetime achievement prize. Mona Simpson, publisher of the Paris Review, said in a statement, “Gornick, like her admired Sebald, pulls off her enormously ambitious interior project—with brash, deep humor, and with a burning interrogation of the many selves she was before this one, here and now, the one talking to us from the page.” In a 2021 interview for Bookforum, Gornick told Emily Gould: “My preoccupation with internal self-division still compels me completely. That’s my

Still from Sarah Polley’s Women Talking. Photo: Courtesy United Artists. Via LitHub, the trailer for Sarah Polley’s film adaptation of Miriam Toews’s novel Women Talking. Leslie Jameson reviewed the book for the summer 2019 issue of Bookforum.  Astra magazine’s new issue, on “filth,” is online now. The editors write, “There is a moral element to filth. It is both what we have been taught to hide, and the subversive pleasure in revealing it.” The magazine’s second issue covers its subject in poetry, fiction, essays, memoir, and more. In Tablet magazine, J. Hoberman looks at the work of Diane Arbus, as David

Lydia Millet. Photo: Nola Millet For the New York Times Magazine, Christine Smallwood profiles Lydia Millet, whose latest novel, Dinosaurs, will be published next week. Millet lives in Arizona, where she works at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Writing and conservation are both aspects of vocation for me,” she tells Smallwood. “She wouldn’t feel like herself if she didn’t write novels and stories, but ‘it feels self-indulgent to do only that. It’s not the same as action.’”  In the current issue of the New York Review of Books, Sigrid Nunez reviews Getting Lost, the newly translated 2001 diary by

Annie Ernaux. Photo: Catherine Hélie, Gallimard. The French novelist and memoirist Annie Ernaux has been awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in literature. Ernaux, an autofiction innovator with about twenty works to her name, is published in the US by the indie press Seven Stories. The press tweeted an exuberant thread, including thanks for Ernauax’s English translators, Alison L. Strayer, Tanya Leslie, and Anna Moschovakis, and links to buy Ernaux hats and shirts with her name printed in a death-metal font. Bookshop.org is running a sale on her books (though most are now on backorder). Ernaux’s most recent book translated

Hanif Abdurraqib. Photo: Megan Leigh Barnard Oprah Daily has the cover reveal for Brandon Taylor’s forthcoming novel The Late Americans, which will be published in May 2023 by Riverhead. Elon Musk is reportedly moving forward in his bid to buy Twitter for $44 billion.  For the New York Times, poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib writes about country music star Loretta Lynn, who died this week at the age of ninety: “I found her to be one of the great romanticists because she was so committed to the rigors of loving herself that she suffered no one. She’d be quick

Vivian Gornick, 2020. Photo: Mitch Bach The National Book Foundation has announced the finalists for the National Book Award.   The Onion has submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in support of Anthony Novak, a parodist who created a fake Facebook page for the Parma Police department in Ohio. The brief states, “As the globe’s premier parodists, The Onion’s writers also have a self-serving interest in preventing political authorities from imprisoning humorists. This brief is submitted in the interest of at least mitigating their future punishment.” For Lux magazine, Vivian Gornick writes about her years in psychoanalysis, the

Victor LaValle. Photo: Teddy Wolff Victor LaValle is adapting his novel The Devil in Silver into a miniseries, which will air on AMC. According to Deadline magazine: “The Devil in Silver would be the first season in a potential new horror anthology series for AMC and AMC+ that will feature average people caught up in horrific stories in today’s world.” LitHub weighs in on who will win the next Nobel Prize.  Early reviewers of Blonde, the new film based on Joyce Carol Oates’s novel of Marilyn Monroe, have not been kind.  Grove Press has purchased Prophet, a new novel

Tsitsi Dangarembga. Photo: Hannah Mentz PEN International has issued a statement on the conviction of Zimbabwean author and filmmaker Tsitsi Dangarembga, who was arrested without explanation or charge while peacefully protesting with her friend Julie Barnes in 2020, and later arraigned in court for “incitement to public violence” and “breaching of COVID-19 health regulations.” Per PEN’s statement, which was released yesterday: “Tsitsi Dangarembga and Julie Barnes should be celebrated as model citizens, not condemned as criminals following a sham trial on trumped up charges of promoting public violence. We called for and expected their unconditional acquittal today, after more

Cathy Park Hong As part of its “At Home in Asian America” feature package, New York magazine has a profile of Cathy Park Hong by Clio Chang. Hong is a poet and the author of Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. Discussing the wide resonance of that 2020 book, Chang writes, “At the time, there were a handful of prominent Asian American writers but no one who served the function of a catchall spokesperson for the idea of Asian America.”  For the New Yorker, Keith Gessen talked to experts in war-termination theory about possible outcomes in Ukraine.  In the

Celeste Ng. Photo: Kieran Kesner As part of a special editorial package “At Home in Asian America: Who Are We Becoming?” in this week’s issue of New York magazine, Andrea Long Chu writes about Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts and considers what it and other “mixed Asian novels” offer readers. For Chu, these are novels written by people who, like their main characters, “are of both white and East or Southeast Asian ancestry”; these characters tend to share “a gnawing uncertainty” about their race and what it means to them. “Asian America is not an idea for these authors,”

Torrey Peters For Electric Literature’s “What Comes Next” series, in which debut authors talk about their second book, Isle McElroy talks with Torrey Peters. Peters tells McElroy, “When I thought of writing as a craft, I don’t think I knew what writing was for. I thought if you write something beautiful that is enough. Now, I feel that writing is largely about communicating something urgent to certain people.”  Bookforum is hosting a free online event on September 30th. “Sports Annotated,” will feature Lindsay Zoladz, Miranda Popkey, Ross Gay, and Thomas Beller discussing sports and literature. You can get your

Hilton Als Publishers Weekly reports from the Joan Didion memorial service, which took place last week at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Speakers included Didion’s Knopf editor Shelley Wanger; New Yorker editor David Remnick; author and musician Patti Smith; actor Vanessa Redgrave; politician Jerry Brown; poet Kevin Young; and writers Hilton Als, Susanna Moore, Jia Tolentino, and Calvin Trillin. Nic Rowan provides his account of the Didion memorial at The Lamp: “The celebration, after all, was a publishing house’s attempt at making the myth of Didion as the Last All-American Writer.”  This fall, Random House will publish

Hilary Mantel. Photo: Els Zweerink  Hilary Mantel, the British author of seventeen books including Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, and The Mirror and the Light—which comprise her trilogy based on Thomas Cromwell’s life—has died at the age of seventy. In addition to her prize-winning historical fiction, Mantel wrote criticism and essays for the London Review of Books, contributing over fifty pieces since 1987. Today, the Review will unpaywall and share a selection of those writings. At his Substack, Leo Robson reflects on Mantel’s philosophy of historical fiction, her influences, and her friendship and collaboration with the Huntington Library

Orhan Pamuk For The Guardian, Lucy Hughes-Hallett reviews Orhan Pamuk’s latest, Nights of Plague, which takes place during the end of the Ottoman Empire.  Hughes-Hallett observes: “ it is a novel about a community ravaged by an incurable disease. It talks—in many different voices—about enforced isolation and lockdown. It tracks the way an epidemic justifies authoritarian measures, providing another way for Pamuk to make a veiled comment on Turkey’s current regime.”  Imani Perry’s new book, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, is out now. In an essay in The Nation, Robert

Sandra Cisneros. Photo: © Keith Dannemiller Yxta Maya Murray interviews Sandra Cisneros about her new book of poetry, Woman Without Shame, which is out now. After a wide-ranging conversation on poetry, her family, and her many awards, Murray asks Cisneros what her most significant relationship was. The poet mentions her dog, Camacho: “He loved me like no human being has ever loved me. Sometimes the great love of your life has four feet and a tail.”  There is still time to get free tickets to Bookforum’s online event, “Sports Annotated,” a discussion of fandom, obsession, and loss with Miranda

Hua Hsu. Photo: Devlin Claro/New York Institute for the Humanities For Vulture, Ryu Spaeth profiles Hua Hsu and argues that Hsu’s new coming-of-age memoir, Stay True, represents an evolution in Asian-American literature. While the book is largely an elegy to a college friend who was murdered after a party, it also depicts Hsu and his buddies just hanging out, with some highly comedic results: “The book has some very funny scenes of Hsu being embarrassed by his extremely basic friend, rolling up the car window so no one can hear Ken blasting ‘Crash Into Me’ on the stereo.” In

Jung Hae Chae Jung Hae Chae has been awarded the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize for her book Pojangmacha People. The prize, which was created to “honor and encourage the art of literary nonfiction,” has in the past gone to writers such as Kevin Young, Leslie Jamison, Esmé Weijun Wang, and Lars Horn. In addition to giving Chae a $20,000 advance and a $2,000 stipend, Graywolf will publish the book, which, according to the publisher, “deeply explores the idea of matrilineal inheritance of ‘han’ in the Korean diaspora…[and] centers the lives of ‘ordinary’ Korean women…who take action as the makers