As Juneteenth morphs from a primarily Texan celebration of African American freedom to a proposed national holiday, Gordon-Reed urges Texans and all Americans to reflect critically on this tangled history. A remarkable meditation on the history and folk mythology of Texas from an African American perspective. Read more
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Janet Malcolm, a longtime writer for The New Yorker who was known for her piercing judgments, her novel-like nonfiction and a provocative moral certainty that cast a cold eye on journalism and its practitioners, died on Wednesday in a hospital in Manhattan. She was 86. Read more
The novelist’s remarks went viral after she criticized former students as well as “social-media-savvy people who are choking on sanctimony and lacking in compassion.” Read more
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…a dynamic and discriminating cultural history that speaks to both readers who know something about the project and those who don’t. Like the American Guides these Depression-era writers worked on, Borchert’s book teems with colorful characters, scenic byways and telling anecdotes; his own writing style is full of “verve” — the much prized quality that so many of the guides themselves possessed. Read more
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American author Jason Reynolds has won the UK’s top children’s books prize, the Carnegie medal, for his “breathtakingly gripping” stories about children on their walk home from school, Look Both Ways. Read more
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This is a disturbing and well-informed look at the darker side of modern American politics. Read more
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Lavie Tidhar Considers the Past, Present, and Future of Jewish Writers in Sci-Fi and Fantasy. Read more
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…“Marlon & Jake Read Dead People,” the deeply literary, deeply fun podcast about books by writers of the past. In this second season, they’ll turn to books new to at least one of them, along with some quirkier choices — while sticking to their theme of speaking candidly of the dead. Read more
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For the past two decades, the novels celebrated for defining our time have almost always been books set within our time, from Jonathan Franzen’s voluminous social comedies to Sally Rooney’s smartly self-knowing novels and the seam of contemporary autofiction that has run between them. Historical fiction, by contrast, has not been in fashion. Or, rather, it has been seen as its own fusty fashion, relentlessly uncontemporary and easy to caricature, filled with mothballed characters who wear costumes rather than clothes, use words like “Prithee!” while having modern-day thoughts, and occasionally encounter villains immediately recognizable by their yellow teeth or suspicious smell. Read more
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To the growing genre of drug-riddled fiction—Irvine Welsh, Denis Johnson, Joel Mowdy, Nico Walker—Krauze adds a flourish, a kind of harsh music, with his use of gang argot … A gritty read for its gore, drugs, and profanity, but possessed of a raw and honest eloquence. Read more
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