Month: June 2025

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‘Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream’ by Megan Greenwell

Megan Greenwell was the editor in chief of Deadspin when it was acquired in 2019 by a Boston-based private equity firm. After three months of watching her new bosses make what seemed to her to be boneheaded decisions, she quit. Two months later, the staff followed her out the door. Within five years, the once popular online sports magazine known for its irreverent reporting had been sold to an obscure Maltese website.

Stunned by what she witnessed, the veteran journalist was determined to get to the bottom of a little understood, lightly regulated industry that owns hospitals, day care centers, supermarket chains, newspapers, commercial and residential real estate, and much more. The big names are Blackstone, the Carlyle Group, Apollo Global Management, KKR and Cerberus Capital Management. But what, she wondered, do they actually do?

The result of her inquiry is “Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream,” a deeply reported, briskly paced and highly disturbing account of how the private equity industry has “reshaped the American economy to serve its own interests, creating a new class of billionaires while stripping ordinary people of their livelihoods, their health care, their homes, and their sense of security.” Read more

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Women’s Prize for Fiction Goes To Debut Novelist Yael Van Der Wouden’s ‘The Safekeep’

Dutch debut novelist Yael van der Wouden has won this year’s Women’s prize for fiction, while British doctor Rachel Clarke took home the nonfiction award. Van der Wouden’s The Safekeep and Clarke’s The Story of a Heart, which made last year’s Booker and Baillie Gifford prize shortlists respectively, were announced as the winners on Thursday evening, with each author awarded £30,000. Read more

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David Means Wins the 2025 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story

“David Means has demonstrated an extraordinary commitment to the short story form throughout his decades-long career,” said Malamud Committee Chair Jung Yun. “His six collections to date serve to remind readers how finely observed, emotionally compelling, and formally inventive a short story can be, particularly in the hands of a craftsperson like Means who possesses such a clear understanding of the powers and pleasures of the form…”

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Cooler Than Cool: The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard

“Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.” So reads the 10th of “10 Rules of Writing” (2007) by Elmore Leonard (1925-2013), the New Orleans-born, Detroit-raised, Hollywood-savvy author who changed the nature of crime stories (in print and on screen) while becoming one of the most successful and highly regarded writers of his genre and generation. Read more

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Tool To Identify Poisonous Books Developed by University of St Andrews

Historically, publishers used arsenic mixed with copper to achieve a vivid emerald green colour for book covers. While the risk to the public is “low”, handling arsenic-containing books regularly can lead to health issues including irritation of the eyes, nose and throat along with more serious side-effects. The toxic pigment in the book bindings can flake off, meaning small pieces can easily be inhaled. Read more

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German Poet Durs Grünbein, British Translator Karen Leeder Win Griffin Poetry Prize

The $130,000 prize is the world’s largest prize for a single book of poetry written in or translated into English. Because the winning book is a translation from German, the Griffin Poetry Prize will allocate 60 per cent of the prize to the translator and 40 per cent to the original poet. Read more

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Novels Inspired by Opinion Polls? They’re Here, and They’re Weird

Pick up a novel and suddenly you’re at the whim of the author’s imagination. Plot, characters, setting — you have no say in these matters. This is part of the appeal of fiction. Now, perhaps for the first time since Choose Your Own Adventure, Tom Comitta tweaks the equation in “People’s Choice Literature,” coming out from Columbia University Press on June 3. The hefty 584-page volume contains two distinct works: “The Most Wanted Novel” and “The Most Unwanted Novel,” each incorporating results of an opinion poll on the literary preferences of 1,045 readers from across the United States. Read more

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‘Metallic Realms’ by Lincoln Michel

…a delightfully broad satire of many things: pulp sci-fi, literary fiction, writers’ groups, MFA programs, nerds™, Brooklyn thirtysomethings, and, most of all, the possibilities and pathologies of fandom culture. It is about the joy and necessity of artistic creation, the self-consuming doubt of struggling writers, the simultaneously symbiotic and parasitic relationship between art and fandom, and the musings of one extremely odd dude. It’s a hoot. Read more

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