Roy Miller's Blog, page 268
February 19, 2017
London Publisher Says He Has Mick Jagger’s Memoir — but Don’t Expect to Read It
Mick Jagger performing in Oslo in 2014. A London publisher says he has a copy of a 75,000-word memoir in which the singer chronicles his early years in rock ’n’ roll.
Credit
Nigel Waldron/Redferns, via Getty Images
LONDON — Drug-induced property purchases. Bathroom breaks while Keith Richards sings. Champagne and caviar feasts that were ordered and then ignored.
All that, and more, is in a decades-old memoir by Mick Jagger, according to the London publisher John Blake. But the management team for the Rolling Stones will not let him publish the work, and a representative for the group has declined to confirm or deny the authenticity of the manuscript.
Mr. Blake, in an article published online by the British magazine The Spectator on Thursday, claimed to have a hard copy of the heretofore unknown memoir.
“It’s extraordinary,” Mr. Blake said in a telephone interview on Thursday. “I compared it to, like, the Dead Sea Scrolls.”
The 75,000-word manuscript chronicles Mr. Jagger’s early years in rock ’n’ roll, until around 1980, Mr. Blake said, adding that he believes the singer worked with a ghostwriter.
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Mr. Blake, a former journalist, knew Mr. Jagger professionally as a young man and said that a “mutual friend” had given him a typed copy of the memoir, with notes scrawled in Mr. Jagger’s hand, around three years ago.
He said that he had first reached out to the musician about publishing it through the manager of the Rolling Stones, Joyce Smyth.
According to Mr. Blake, Ms. Smyth initially said that the singer did not remember the memoir, and had requested a copy. She subsequently confirmed its authenticity, he said, and asked if Mr. Jagger could write a foreword that explained that the work had been written early in his career.
In the months that followed, Mr. Blake reached out repeatedly, he said, but he was told that Mr. Jagger was too busy to cooperate on the book. Eventually, around the end of 2015, Ms. Smyth told Mr. Blake that he would not be granted permission to publish the work, a position she reiterated on Thursday.
“John Blake writes to me from time to time seeking permission to publish this manuscript,” Ms. Smyth said in a statement sent by her law firm. “The answer is always the same: He cannot, because it isn’t his and he accepts this. Readers will be able to form a view as regards the matters to which John Blake refers when Sir Mick’s autobiography appears, should he choose to write it.”
“Life,” the 2010 memoir by Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, which explores the band’s heyday and the sometimes tumultuous relationship between Mr. Richards and Mr. Jagger, was hailed by critics, including Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times, who called it “electrifying.”
Mr. Jagger, however, has made clear that he has no interest in writing a memoir. “If someone wants to know what I did in 1965, they can look it up on Wikipedia,” he told the Hollywood Reporter in an article published in early 2014.
Mr. Blake outlined a number of lively details from the book in his article for The Spectator: Mr. Jagger’s purchase of a historic house, Stargroves, in the English countryside, while he was high on a psychedelic drug; episodes in which the band demanded caviar and stuffed quails backstage, but didn’t eat them; and Mr. Jagger’s habit of drinking eight pints of water before concerts, knowing he would sweat it out in performance.
“It is delicious, heady stuff,” Mr. Blake wrote in the article. “Like reading Elvis Presley’s diaries from the days before he grew fat and washed-up in Vegas.”
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In the phone interview, he said that the memoir also showed a side of Mr. Jagger that is in contrast with his reputation as a hard-living Lothario.
“It’s not sensational, it’s sweet, is what it is. It’s delightful,” he said, adding that Mr. Jagger appeared, to some extent, to hold back from revealing unsavory details of life on the road. “What I suspect happened is that because he didn’t really want to bear his soul, the publisher rejected it.”
Mr. Blake said he could not circumvent the Rolling Stones management team and publish the material because Mr. Jagger owns the rights to the manuscript. To his knowledge, he said, he has the only copy other than a photocopy he sent to Mr. Jagger.
That claim could not be verified.
Asked why he was making the matter public, Mr. Blake framed the issue as one of public service.
“People will be writing theses about the Rolling Stones in 100 years time” he said in the interview. “It’s such a rare primary document that I kind of, like — I just thought the world would be interested to know about this. That was all.”
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Is This Really Marcel Proust in a Movie?
Found: The Only Known Footage of Proust?
Newly discovered black-and-white footage of a 1904 wedding filmed shows a glimpse of a young man with a mustache, wearing a bowler hat and formal suit, descending a flight of stairs (about 4 seconds into the footage). It's believed to be the only existing film of the French writer.
By COLLECTION et RESTAURATION CNC on Publish Date February 16, 2017.
Photo by Collection et Restauration CNC.
Watch in Times Video »
Is this the only known glimpse of Marcel Proust in a motion picture?
A university professor has discovered silent black-and-white film footage from 1904 showing a man wearing a bowler hat descending church steps at a wedding in Paris.
The professor, Jean-Pierre Sirois-Trahan, of Laval University in Canada, discovered the film in archives in Paris, he said. The scene provides but a glimpse of the man (four seconds into the footage), but Prof. Sirois-Trahan believes it could just be the only known footage of the influential French author.
“We can never prove it beyond all doubt,” he said in an interview by email. “I try to support the hypothesis and to each decide for himself.”
He said if it indeed was Proust walking carefully down the steps, glancing from side to side, then the world would for the first time be able to see the author in the powerful medium of film, which he said brings the past “alive.”
Photo
Though many photos like this one exist of Marcel Proust, a professor believes he has found the only film footage of the French novelist.
Professor William C. Carter, author of a Proust biography, said that Proust, who died in 1922 at 51, would have been 34 at the time of the film. He said Proust was known to have attended the wedding in Paris. While there exist many photographs of Proust, there is no recording of the author’s voice and no known film footage, he said.
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“It would be very important that we have this brief image of Proust in motion,” he said. Several experts had contacted him and were convinced it is Proust, he said, but he is not so sure.
“We would all like that to be Proust,” he said. “I am not saying it’s not Proust. It would be helpful if we could see his eyes or his hair.”
He said the man shown on the film looked a little too young for 34.
Professor Sirois-Trahan said the marriage was of a friend of Proust, Armand de Guiche, with Elaine Greffulhe, in the church of the Madeleine in Paris.
According to the British Times Literary Supplement, Elaine was daughter of the Count and the Countess Greffulhe, who is said to have been an inspiration for the Duchess of Guermantes in Proust’s novel.
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First, Emil Ferris Was Paralyzed. Then Her Book Got Lost at Sea.
“Monsters,” from Fantagraphics, takes the form of a sketchbook diary as Karen tries to solve the murder of her stunning yet mysterious upstairs neighbor, Anka. Ms. Ferris’s ferocious Expressionistic art, with its Crumb-like crosshatching, nails the grit-in-your-mouth feel of her home city.
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And monsters are more than a metaphor for Ms. Ferris. “I still do love monsters,” she said. “And when I was a kid, they were really important to me. I couldn’t wait for Saturday night.” Because Saturdays meant the local creature double-feature and fright-fests like “Carnival of Souls” and “The Pit and the Pendulum.”
Ms. Ferris says those film terrors provided a crucial counterpoint to her own life: “This was the ’60s. I watched protests being broken up by the police. I saw bigotry. It made me think about our own inner monstrousness.”
Then there’s the beast of work. Ms. Ferris, who, despite chronic pain, often grinds out 16-hour days, said, “I live like a mole in a hole.” That mole, though, does get out and about on her canes. “I do a lot of drawing on the El and in cafes.”
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Ms. Ferris’s book is populated with the covers of monster comics that never were.
Credit
Emil Ferris/Fantagraphics
Of the passion needed to complete a 400-page graphic novel — a second similarly scary tome is almost done — Ms. Ferris wrote in an email: “For an impetuous-minded artist the requisite devotion and rituals of creating a graphic novel are a bit like a hair shirt, a cat-o’-nine-tails (and a chastity belt, certainly).”
Ms. Ferris has worked in a range of media, from animation to painting, but “Monsters,” with its rainbow hues, is almost wholly drawn in Bic pen, complemented by Flair markers. She started out drawing it on actual white, lined notebook paper. “But then I started to do it in layers, because it was so hard to make corrections.”
There are still days when Ms. Ferris needs to hole up. “When I’m too worn out or in pain I lie in bed and write in my mind,” she said in an email.
Her dreams often pick up the slack, and they helped her create one of the book’s grisly delights. “Monsters” is sprinkled with covers of terror mags that never were: Ghastly, Gory Stories, Ghoulish and more, inspired by movie posters and classic 1950s EC comics like Tales From the Crypt and The Vault of Horror.
Ms. Ferris has lived mostly in Chicago, and that intimate knowledge shines through in her Dickensian drawings of city life. Born on the South Side, she grew up in the Uptown neighborhood on the North Side. “We lived in this beautiful old building that was in great disrepair,” she said. “We were all from somewhere else, and living in these castles.”
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Anka Silverberg is the novel’s woman of mystery.
Credit
Emil Ferris/Fantagraphics
Ms. Ferris has spent her life as an artist, but she has also waited tables and cleaned houses. And she still hasn’t put that hand-to-mouth life behind her. “As we speak,” she said, “I have $14 and a bag of pecans. I’m basically still stealing bank coffee.”
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But her inner life has always been rich because of her love for art. “It’s a delicious thing, to think about the artists you love,” Ms. Ferris said. “I tend to taste chocolate.”
Those who conjure sweetness for her include Otto Dix, George Grosz and Aubrey Beardsley. Among cartoonists she cites R. Crumb, Alison Bechdel and Mr. Spiegelman.
“When I read ‘Maus,’ I realized you could tell a story of tremendous import using the graphic novel.”
Mr. Spiegelman, for his part, praises her approach. “She uses the sketchbook idea as a way to change the grammar and syntax of the comics page,” he said in a recent phone interview. “And she came out of nowhere. Until recently, no one was aware of Emil — including Emil.”
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February 18, 2017
Hit Makers: How Things Become Popular review – the secret of selling squillions | Books
There are no doubt plenty of people - but probably not as many as read the book - who simply can’t fathom how EL James can have sold more than 125m copies of Fifty Shades of Grey. Derek Thompson is here to help. The reason, it transpires, is pretty straightforward: a winning combination of social connection, five-star ebook reviews, the fan-fiction community and, finally, marketing. That might sound banal, but in Hit Makers, Thompson does a really fascinating job of explaining how things become popular, drawing on a wide range of cultural phenomena, from Star Wars to the iPhone, Taylor Swift to Game of Thrones. Reading its countless interesting references, it quickly becomes clear that Hit Makers is less a how-to guide – Thomson believes success is often “semichaotic” – and more a how-come? conversation with an engaging popular culture expert. The conclusion? Mere imitation rarely begets a hit, but the elusive combination of familiarity, innovation and marketing stands a better chance.
• Hit Makers: How Things Become Popular by Derek Thompson is published by Allen Lane (£20). To order a copy for £15 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
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Wharton Uses Zola’s Everywhere Store to Launch Online Bookstore
Thanks to a widget developed by Zola Books, the Wharton Digital Press this week announced that it has launched a new online bookstore that will enable readers to discover and purchase books authored by faculty of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and Wharton Digital Press authors.
Aimed at a general audience of business and public policy readers, the Wharton Digital Press Bookstore will offer a selection of titles in e-book, print, and audiobook formats. “For the first time, the Wharton School has a central location, with global reach, to promote books by its faculty, regardless of publisher, alongside Wharton Digital Press authors’ books,” said Stephen J. Kobrin, executive director of Wharton Digital Press.
The store is the first to be powered by Zola’s Everywhere Store widget, an API that enables anyone to begin selling books simply by dropping a few lines of Zola’s code on to their website. Formed as part of Zola Books, the widget draws from an extensive catalogue of titles, including books from the Big Five publishers, in both digital and print formats, and works with all e-book formats (often including the Kindle, depending on a book’s DRM), and with print fulfillment handled by Ingram. The widget is free; Zola makes its money through a revenue share. In addition, the seller fully owns the customer relationship—the sellers capture the email addresses, customer data, and analytics.
“We’re excited that Wharton Digital Press is launching their new bookstore with The Everywhere Store,” said Zola Books CEO Joe Regal, in a statement. “We believe it's good for readers, who can buy books directly without having to be sent elsewhere, and good for partners like Wharton Digital Press, who get total access to all the data and analytics, and can easily offer specials, bulk discounts, bundles, and other premiums that make their readers happy.”
After announcing Zola’s pivot to tech provider in November of 2015, Regal said the Wharton store is the first of several launches to come.
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The Best and Latest in Crime Fiction
Credit
Christoph Niemann
Ugly Americans on a European vacation are always good for a laugh. But you laugh at your peril at the Ugly Brits vacationing in America in RUSH OF BLOOD (Atlantic Monthly, $25), Mark Billingham’s savage satire about good friends whose special bond originated in murder. Three couples who are all from London find themselves staying at the same cheesy beach resort on Siesta Key in Sarasota. That’s as good a reason as any for Angie and Barry, Dave and Marina, and Ed and Sue to strike up a friendship when they meet at the Pelican Palms.
The wives are jealous, competitive and catty, but still easier to take than their husbands. Ed is a vulgarian and a bully. Barry is a pathetic worm. Dave is a genial jackass. The thing is, one of these terrible tourists used precious vacation time to murder another guest at the resort, 14-year-old Amber-Marie Wilson, a friendly child with “mental difficulties,” as her mother puts it. From the killer’s interior monologues we learn that this won’t be the last murder. Back home, where the couples have been hosting dinner parties to keep in touch, this perv is already haunting special-ed schools trolling for another victim. Billingham, who also writes the Tom Thorne mystery series, brings in investigators on both sides of the Atlantic to broaden the cast of characters and introduce some procedural details. Jeffrey Gardner, the American detective in charge, is the soul of compassion; but he’d be more inclined to give up on the file if it weren’t for Jenny Quinlan, a trainee constable who prods him into letting her work his case along with a similar killing outside London.
Even these good guys are flawed, which makes them attractively human, if not as monstrously fascinating as “the Sarasota Six,” as they call themselves. “Nobody knows anyone really, do they?” Angie muses during one of the drunken dinner parties at which the hideous husbands and their enabler wives draw on their best social skills to conceal their kinky pleasures and secret sorrows. It’s maddening, the way Billingham keeps us in suspense, cringing from each character while keeping watch as if our own lives depended on it — but we wouldn’t want it any other way.
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The Great War is never over in the mournful tales of the mother-and-son authors who write as Charles Todd. Inspector Ian Rutledge, the Scotland Yard detective in this elegant historical series, was shellshocked in battle and is still haunted by the dead. But those personal nightmares make him profoundly responsive to the suffering of others, like the wounded souls he encounters in RACING THE DEVIL (Morrow/HarperCollins, $26.99). In 1916, on the eve of the Battle of the Somme, a group of English officers make a bet with the Devil. Those who survive will meet in Paris and race their motorcars to Nice. At the end of the war, the race is on, but one car is forced into a ravine and the driver barely survives.
A year later, in East Sussex, another racing car is rammed off the road, and this time the driver — not the captain who owns the car, but the local rector — is killed. Evidence of foul play brings Rutledge down from London to a village that, like all the rural places he has visited in this series, is still mourning its war dead. Todd writes a rich mystery, but in investigating the murder Rutledge also probes the psychic wounds of the village and tries to minister to the collective survivor guilt of the living. “The dead,” as the voice in his head tells him, “still believe it was worth dying for.”
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Anyone toying with the idea of emigrating might consider Siglufjordur, the outermost village in the north of Iceland and the setting of SNOWBLIND (Thomas Dunne/Minotaur, $25.99), a first novel by Ragnar Jonasson in a chilly translation by Quentin Bates. The story is set during the 2008 fiscal collapse; but since the boom never made it this far north, the crash doesn’t make an impact either. Remote as it is, Siglufjordur proves the ideal job posting for Ari Thor Arason, a former theology student who recently graduated from the police academy. Ari Thor may be naïve when it comes to affairs of the heart, but he shows intelligence and persistence in investigating the apparently accidental death of a local author. This classically crafted whodunit holds up nicely, but Jonasson’s true gift is for describing the daunting beauty of the fierce setting, lashed by blinding snowstorms that smother the village in “a thick, white darkness” that is strangely comforting.
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It’s New Year’s Eve in Sam Hawken’s hard-boiled action novel WALK AWAY (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $26). His protagonist puts in sweat time at the gym punching the heavy bag, rides home on a Harley, chows down on a pound-and-a-half steak, with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s . . . and then she falls into bed. Camaro Espinoza, who did tours in the Middle East, is tougher than an army boot. But she’s got a soft spot for her sister, Annabel, who periodically calls for help with the brutal men she keeps hooking up with. Annabel sends out another distress call from Carmel begging her sister to rescue her one more time. But in dishing out punishment to Jake Collier, Camaro earns the hatred of his brother, Lukas, a stone killer whose homicidal exploits account for much of the action. Camaro isn’t entirely believable as a fighting machine, but it’s deeply satisfying to watch her take out an animal like Lukas.
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Sales Slipped, Profits Rose in 2016 at S&S
Simon & Schuster finished 2016 with a small drop in revenue compared to 2015 but with a modest increase in earnings, parent company CBS reported. Revenue for the year was $767 million, down 1.8% from 2015 sales of $780 million. Operating income increased 4.4%, to $119 million.
The revenue decline was due in part to a soft fourth quarter in which sales dropped 10.3%, to $209 million, but earnings increased 5.8%, to $36 million. The sales drop in the quarter was attributed to difficult comparisons to the last quarter of 2015, when Stephen King’s The Bazaar of Bad Dreams was a big bestseller.
The increase in profits coupled with the drop in revenue resulted in a 15.5% operating margin, up from 14.6% in 2015.
S&S CEO Carolyn Reidy said that given the overall flat market, "a 2% dip [in sales] is pretty good." She noted that in order to get meaningful revenue growth under today's market conditions, publishers need to either "add a new business or take market share away" from competitors. In late November, S&S bought Adams Media, but given the short time it was part of S&S it did not make a significant contribution to S&S's top line last year, Reidy said. She added that S&S continues to look for possible new acquisitions, but said S&S is "particular" about the type of company it is looking to buy. As for taking away market share, she noted that S&S faces some tough competitors and said the only way to be successful "is to have the best titles consumers want to buy."
S&S's strongest performing division in 2016 was audio, which benefited from another year of double-digit growth in digital audio, Reidy said. The increase in sales in digital audio helped to offset some of the decline in e-books, but total digital sales lost one percentage point in terms of its overall contribution to company revenues. The children's and international divisions had good years, but sales in the adult group were down.
Reidy credited the improved bottom line in part to continued efficiencies S&S has been able to generate through the implementation of new technology across the company. Asked if there are more efficencies to be found, Reidy said, "we won't stop looking."
Reidy said she was "pretty excited" about prospects for 2017. S&S has a number of new books set for the first half of 2017 by authors who were bestsellers last year. Those include Beartown by Fredrik Backman, whose A Man Called Ove was one of the biggest surprise standouts last year. Mary Higgins Clark will be back with All by Myself, Alone, while the company will release the trade paperback edition of All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doer in April. S&S will release the first two titles in its Salaam Reads imprint in March. In the second half of 2017, S&S will publish two new books by Hillary Clinton.
And June will bring the release of Dangerous by the polarizing figure Milo Yiannopolous. S&S's Threshold Editions has not released details on how the book will be published.
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Bookstore Sales Rose Again in 2016
Bookstore sales rose 2.5% in 2016 over 2015, hitting just under $12 billion, according to preliminary estimates released last week by the U.S. Census Bureau. The increase was the second year in a row that bookstore sales rose after seven years of decline. (The census figures include revenue from all retailers “primarily engaged” in selling new books, which includes outlets other than indie and chain stores. The preliminary figures are also usually revised by the government).
The gain for the full year came despite the lack of many big hits (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child was last year’s top print seller) and distractions caused by the presidential election. Indeed, bookstore sales were up 6.1% in the first half of 2016 but softened as the year, and the election, wore on. A hoped-for post-election sales bounce did not materialize. Bookstore sales in December were down 3.1% compared to a year ago.
Though bookstore sales last year were down 2.3% compared to 2012, the recent trend line is positive. The rate of sales declines peaked in 2012 and the 2.5% increase posted in 2016 followed a 3.2% gain in 2015.
Bookstore sales 2012–2016
($ in millions)
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
Sales
$12,269
$11,501
$11,320
$11,683
$11,981
Year-to-year Change
-8.9%
-6.3%
-1.6%
3.2%
2.5%
A version of this article appeared in the 02/20/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Bookstore Sales Rose Again in 2016
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The Harlem Renaissance’s New Chapter
Claude McKay in the 1920s.
Credit
Corbis, via Getty Images
Black History Month this year brings with it a significant addition to the history of African-American literature: “Amiable With Big Teeth,” a “lost” novel by the notable Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay.
In 2009, Jean-Christophe Cloutier, now an assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, was working toward his Ph.D. at Columbia University when he came across a double-spaced manuscript that appeared to be by McKay among the archived papers of Samuel Roth, a publisher who had often found himself in First Amendment battles.
When The Times reported on the manuscript’s authentication in 2012, the writer and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. said McKay’s lost novel was important, in part, for the way it extended our view of the Harlem Renaissance, which “continued to be vibrant and creative and turned its focus to international issues” as the 1930s progressed.
“Amiable With Big Teeth” — with a subtitle equal to its wonderful title (“A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem”) — is about a group of activists in that neighborhood who banded together to support Ethiopia against Mussolini’s occupation. In their introduction, Cloutier and Brent Hayes Edwards call the book a “caustic, even overtly polemical, depiction of the complex Harlem political landscape in the mid-1930s as it shifted in the shadow of international events.”
The book reflects McKay’s increasingly impassioned opposition to Communism as he got older. That it ended up drifting into Roth’s archives and being neglected is not surprising, given a letter McKay wrote in 1941 that implies he was less than fastidious about even precious belongings. “I have not been careless about them,” he wrote, “but one loses manuscripts in packing and moving, sometimes one makes the mistake of throwing out valuable items with trash.”
Quotable
“I think almost every fiction writer I know would say you don’t want to start out writing something if you think you can do it. . . . If you know you can write it, it’s not worth writing in some way.” — Katie Kitamura, author of “A Separation,” in an interview with Literary Hub
Contemplating a Sea Change
Margaret Drabble’s new novel, “The Dark Flood Rises” — reviewed this week by Cynthia Ozick — is deeply concerned with aging and mortality. Drabble, who is 77, wrote about her personal feelings about death in The Guardian last year. One sentence stood out for its quick pivot from shock to politesse: “I wouldn’t mind a sea burial, as the thought of being devoured underwater is strangely attractive to me, but I think it’s hard to arrange, and I won’t want to be a nuisance.”
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Lit Hub Weekly: February 13 – 17, 2017
The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day
TODAY: In 1931, Toni Morrison is born.
“There are beautiful, very tiny literary and art forms in just about every medium I can think of.” An interview with 300 Arguments author Sarah Manguso. | Hazlitt
“When my father was fired, he lost the job for which his combination of intelligence, pride, and obduracy had made him perfectly suited.” Gregory Pardlo on his father’s participation in the 1981 air-traffic controllers’ strike. | The New Yorker
I thought of my work as a form of séance with mostly dead writers, some sort of ghostly visitation: An interview with Kate Zambreno. | BLARB
“But written all over that book in smudges, black and blue and pink, green, and yellow, is one experience that I cannot forget: epiphany.” Vann R. Newkirk II’s introduction to a new edition of The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois. | Essence
Recommendations of 10 recent Balkan novels, including works by Aleksandar Hemon, Herta Müller, and Miroslav Penkov. | The Calvert Journal
I just want to enjoy your nextness and nearness: Bill Hayes on loving Oliver Sacks. | BuzzFeed Reader
“All of us who write and teach and make art will need to be braver, for at least the next four years.” Viet Thanh Nguyen interviews Chris Santiago. | Los Angeles Review of Books
“[T]he question of freedom—who is, isn’t, and never was free—has taken on increasing urgency.” Salamishah Tillet on a spate of 20th century novels about slavery. | Public Books
Philip Pullman has announced that he will be writing a follow-up “companion” series to the His Dark Materials trilogy. | NPR
“I do think that relationships function because we play roles.” An interview with Katie Kitamura. | Jezebel
How bookstores are helping to mobilize resistance against Trump. | The New York Times
What does it mean to invoke Beyoncé? Morgan Parker on academia, black womanhood, and her new poetry collection. | NYLON
“I see shame as part of a process of becoming free: to create or, yes, to love.” An interview with Rachel Cusk. | BOMB Magazine
“America, because it shares borders with so few countries, because it is so isolated, has an apocalyptic relationship with the world.” Karan Mahajan on travel writing. | Granta
A new project, #UnitedStatesOfBooks, will highlight a book that captures the “literary spirit” of each state. | Penguin Random House
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