At The Wilmington Star News, a round-up of the news coverage of the suicide of The Virginia Quarterly Review‘s managing editor, Kevin Morrissey, and the accusations that Morrissey’s boss, Ted Genoways, the wunderkind editor-in-chief of VQR, may have played a role in the suicide. In the wake of this sad controversy, the University of Virginia has shut down the 85-year-old journal, pending an internal investigation.
Dark Times at The Virginia Quarterly
The Underground Railroad: The Series
Moonlight director Barry Jenkins plans to adapt Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad as a limited-run series. In his review of the novel for our site last year, Greg Walklin gushed that “Whitehead’s brilliance is on constant display.”
“I don’t believe the reader needs to know anything about me.”
Ben Lerner has a story [subscription required] in this week’s New Yorker that, like his debut novel Leaving the Atocha Station, features a protagonist named The Author. The magazine interviewed Lerner about the invitation to blur his fiction with his autobiography. He says that his work in an exercise in “activating those questions in peculiar ways—but the questions, not the answers, are what strike me as interesting.”
The Stories We Tell
Of more than 23,000 front-page articles that appeared in The New York Times between 1939 and 1945, only 26 were about the Holocaust. Watch a powerful 18-minute mini-documentary about “how and why the genocide of Jews was neglected and euphemised by the Times, and by extension, the American people.” Pair with our piece about the German traditions of the Denkmahl and Mahnmahl, two different kinds of memorials with subtle, yet important distinctions.
What is a diverse book?
Year in Reading alum Rumaan Alam reflects at The Literary Hub about the labels we ascribe to texts. Pair with his recent interview with Lindsay Hatton.
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Vitality/Banality
To prepare us for the release of Italo Calvino’s letters, the editors at Page-Turner are running excerpts from the book. In their latest installment — following their first two — Calvino describes New York City, which “swallowed [him] up like a carnivorous plant.”
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Whodunnit
And then there was you: the Oxford English Dictionary is soliciting public help in tracking down “a mysterious, possibly pornographic, 19th-century book from which a number of its quotations are derived.”