( Guardian)Īt the Margins, Kazim Ali pays tribute to the poet, novelist, and critic Meena Alexander for tackling “that terrifying condition of the human heart in the most universal of terms.”
“The meaning of a book is to awaken you, to make you feel alive, to make you open your eyes and look at human beings differently.” Novelist Leïla Slimani joins Hanya Yanagihara, Bret Easton Ellis, and other writers in sharing the purpose of their novels’ shock value. The festival’s lineup features more than two hundred writers and intellectuals, including Jennifer Egan, Masha Gessen, Marlon James, and Arundhati Roy. This year’s PEN World Voices Festival kicks off on Monday. ( Publishers Weekly)īaltimore mayor Catherine Pugh has resigned in the wake of the scandal surrounding her self-published children’s books. Pugh is under investigation for receiving roughly $500,000 from the University of Maryland Medical System, where she was a board member until March, for copies of her Healthy Holly books. Tsiang, East Goes West by Younghill Kang, No-No Boy by John Okada, and America Is in the Heart by Carlos Bulosan will each be published with an introduction by a contemporary Asian American author, including Alexander Chee and Elaine Castillo. To coincide with Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month, Penguin Classics will add four novels by Asian American writers to its line this May. We will have fun.” Roxane Gay has launched Gay Magazine, an online publishing platform that will feature writing about culture, politics, and more. We will challenge our readers and ourselves. “We will respect our readers’ time and intelligence. Because they exist.Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines-from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches-for all the news that creative writers need to know. Gay sounds excited when she says she’s “going to be talking about the books themselves. The idea is to engage critically with the actual work of underrepresented writers - to “move beyond the numbers.” The blog will feature mostly reviews and interviews. I’ve accepted that, but what I can do is talk about books.” It’s a moral imperative, and until there’s a financial imperative, they’re not going to change. There’s no financial imperative for them to change. “I kept it pretty short,” she says, “because we know the numbers, and because the numbers don’t move the people in power. Quite honestly, it’s going to take the editors of these major publications just making clear mandates about including diverse coverage.”Īt The Nation, Gay’s short inaugural post updated her count with a few different types of reviewing venues: the 50-year-old New York Review of Books, 19-year-old Bookforum, National Public Radio and the Los Angeles Review of Books, a 17-month-old independent online review. When asked about the response to these earlier essays, Gay, who spoke by phone Tuesday, said she “felt like it brought more awareness to the issue, and people responded really, really well.” But, she says, “It’s certainly going to take more than just a couple blog posts on The Rumpus to really create the change that’s necessary.
#ROXANE GAY ESSAYS AVAILABLE ONLINE HOW TO#
After publishing her findings on The Rumpus, Gay crowd-sourced a list of writers of color as a corrective gesture aimed at editors and readers who responded that they just don’t know how to find writers of color. That year, about 12% of the 742 books reviewed by the New York Times were authored by people of color. Gay has been down this road before - in the summer of 2012 she counted the number of reviews of books by writers of color in 2011’s New York Times. Gay, author of the story collection “Ayiti” as well as an essayist and editor, has dedicated herself to calling attention to the lack of diversity in the way we talk about books in this country and to pointing readers toward talented writers of color that she says the media is overlooking.
For the next two weeks Roxane Gay will be blogging at The Nation about new books by writers of color.