Creative 5/20/2022

The Believer returns to McSweeney's, Conjunctions rides again

UP FOR DISCUSSION

 

MEMES

The most dramatic moment in 21st Century literature pic.twitter.com/jYME7pCVyP

— Kate Hewson (@katejhewson) May 12, 2022

 

SALVATION FOR THE BELIEVER, CONJUNCTIONS

The literary internet breathed a sigh of relief this week when The Believer’s original owner, McSweeney’s, announced it bought back the magazine from its brief, bizarre owner, Paradise Media. As Study Hall previously reported, the marketing company — through one of its founder’s other brands, Sex Toy Collective — had purchased the magazine from the University of Las Vegas, Nevada after a series of upsets that turned it from a literary darling to a toxic asset.   

While it hasn’t yet been disclosed what McSweeney’s paid for The Believer, The New York Times reported that Paradise Media initially spent $225,000 on its strange experiment and that McSweeney’s bought it back days after the online uproar for a lesser sum. FWIW: when philanthropist Beverly Rogers and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas’s Black Mountain Institute teamed up to buy The Believer from McSweeney’s in 2017, they paid $650,000. According to the Times, this influx of cash allowed the journal to “thrive,” but the mag “was never financially self-sustaining.”  

During the week or so when one of the leading journals of the intelligentsia was briefly owned by a company that published such refined articles as “Douching for Dummies,” the literary internet bemoaned the sorry state of independent art magazines. One of the more stable-seeming mags given its partnership with the UNLV and the significant patronage of Beverly Rogers, The Believer’s folding seemed to indicate some larger, existential threat facing intellectual creative writing. Or maybe an existential threat facing thoughtful media, period? (see: Tudum, CNN+, Bitch Media … and that’s just since mid-April!) 

A similar turnaround happened this week when Conjunctions, the literary magazine at Bard College, announced that it would not fold. The magazine had announced in March that the college could no longer afford to support it. This week’s news gives the lit mag another three years.  

BEST OF LIT TWITTER

– Roxane Gay wants to know: who has a book coming out in November? 

AWARD ZONE

– Patricia Lockwood received the Dylan Thomas Prize for “No One Is Talking About This,” an award of £20,000 (USD $24,984).
– Playwright Jeremy O. Harris (“Slave Play”) was awarded the 2023 Yale Drama Series Prize, “one of the theater world’s most prestigious playwriting prizes,” Deadline reports.
– Playwright Lynn Nottage is record-breaking on many fronts: the Museum of Broadway tweeted that in addition to being “the only woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama TWICE [sic], she is now the first woman to be #Tonynominated [sic] for writing both a play (“Clyde’s”) and a musical (“MJ”) in the same season.” 

CRAFT CORNER

– Author Sara Nović penned an essay for The Guardian about her new book “True Biz,” being a Deaf writer, and how she “would not have become a writer without” American Sign Language.
– Also at The Guardian, Michael Morpurgo talked to Amy Fleming about the best way to foster a love of writing in children.
– For LitHub, Naheed Phiroze Patel considered the similarities between “writing and tending a garden.” 

THE LATEST IN LIBRARIES

– Librarians in Texas are opening up about the pressures they face amidst growing calls to ban certain books.
– After holding a Congressional hearing in April, Congressman Jamie Raskin stated that he plans to convene another session to discuss the “troubling wave of censorship and book banning around the country.”
– Someone keeps stealing books from a pocket-sized LGBTQ library in Boston.

IN MEMORIAM

– This week, I was saddened to learn that Sophie Raphaeline, the owner of Berlin-based English bookstore and community space Another Country, died earlier this month after prolonged health issues. Before the pandemic, Another Country regularly hosted generous dinners for Berlin’s international community, and was one of the first places I went when I moved here. In the bookstore, I felt that everyone was accepted and welcome; that anyone had the potential to be a new, close friend. During one memorable visit, I timidly parked myself in an overstuffed armchair in the bookstore’s corner; one man I talked to laughed and said he didn’t think he’d ever seen someone check out a book from the shelves, though he came weekly to their dinners. As Jacinta Nandi put it in Exberliner, “Another Country wasn’t a business as such, rather a community hub for all kinds of expat writers, artists, eccentrics, the lost and the lonely.” To date, there has been no announcement about the future of the bookstore. 

DEALS, DEALS, DEALS

– Poet, writer, and Tin House editor-in-chief Hanif Abdurraqib made his first acquisition as the head of the indie press: Prince Shakur’s memoir, “When They Tell You To Be Good.” The book is slated to publish in October 2022.
– Colin Kaepernick is writing a YA graphic novel.
– Rick Perlstein sold a new book about post-2000s American politics to Little, Brown and Co. this week.

RECOMMENDED READING

– I’m obsessed with this piece at Vanity Fair that tries to figure out wtf is actually going on in the Conways’ marriage: namely, if its constitutive parties “hate each other as much as their public commentary would suggest.”
– At NPR, Maureen Corrigan recommends four perfect early-summer books.
– Ukrainian poet Serhiy Zhadan’s latest, “The History of Snow,” published at Modern Poetry In Translation.
– Vulture profiled author Akwaeke Emezi.
– At The New York Times, Marc Tracy excoriates the media industry’s role in uplifting J.D. Vance by underestimating him as a “Never Trump guy.”

AND EVERYTHING ELSE

– The Atlantic is launching its own publishing house, Atlantic Editions. They plan to publish six to twelve books annually in collaboration with indie press Zando.
– PEN hosted an “emergency” symposium in New York to discuss “Ukraine, the killing of the Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, social media polarization, climate change, the deluge of disinformation and the global decline of democracy.”
– David Sedaris, author of “Me Talk Pretty One Day” and “When You Are Engulfed In Flames” will be the opening speaker for the US Book Fair on May 23.