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
Author: GR
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Sparks Controversy in Online Essay
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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Republic of Detours: How the New Deal Paid Broke Writers to Rediscover America
…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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Jason Reynolds wins Carnegie medal for ‘breathtaking’ Look Both Ways
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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The Storm Is upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything
This is a disturbing and well-informed look at the darker side of modern American politics. Read more
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Jews in Space: On the Unsung History of Jewish Writers and the Birth of Science Fiction
Lavie Tidhar Considers the Past, Present, and Future of Jewish Writers in Sci-Fi and Fantasy. Read more
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For novelist-podcaster Marlon James, it’s Dead Writer Summer
…“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 Literary Novelists the Past Is Pressing
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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Who They Was by Gabriel Krauze
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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Dante in the dock: Why Florence wants to clear the poet’s name
Seven hundred years after the poet’s death, many believe he should be exonerated of the crimes for which he was exiled from Florence. Was he the victim of a conspiracy? Read more
