The New Negroni

A Heartbreaking Work of Swaggering Genius Namwali Serpell’s study of Toni Morrison – Omari Weekes

My latest review for @bookforum.bsky.social is also out now. In it, I think alongside Namwali Serpell’s resplendently rigorous new book on Toni Morrison about the last greatest living writer’s legacy and how we’re meant to read her.

R1: No we're not hiring on the tenure track because our peers aren't hiring on the tenure track
R1: Our peers aren't hiring on the tenure track because we aren't hiring on the tenure track
R1: wtf our grad students aren't getting hired on the tenure track
R1: No one could know how this happened

Pretty sure this is the first (and probably only) time I’m on a podcast. ☺️

This is my first attempt to capture a live event of this size.

I’m thankful to @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social & @johannawinant.bsky.social for letting me adapt the launch of their tremendous book.

I think these episodes will be an additive supplement to it.

Don’t you wish this were a podcast? 😉

Close Reading Is For Everyone Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant Call for Pitches Based on our previous Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century, we are at work on a new version that’s shorter, slimmer, and aimed at a more general audience. We’re looking for a new set of contributors who would write excellent, brief, model close readings of texts that high schoolers might know and care about. Think: “The Gettysburg Address,” Macbeth, and Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” but also song lyrics, idioms, or even a visual image. What is your best, most instructive, most exciting, most welcoming example of how a close reading builds a real argument out from a tiny, perhaps overlooked detail? If you’re interested in pitching us, please send us your 250-word close reading of the text you propose. Your close reading should be mappable using our vocabulary of close reading: the five steps of scene setting, noticing, local claiming, regional argumentation, and global theorizing. (Our close reading of “The Red Wheelbarrow” in the early pages of our introduction is the sort of thing we’re seeking.) If we think we can use yours, we’ll ask you to expand it to a 1,200 word essay in which you explain how your close reading works step by step. We seek close readings both of texts that are canonical and also ones that aren’t. And so we invite contributors both from the discipline of literary studies, and other disciplines across the university, and the public humanities beyond it. Send your pitches—please include your name and contact info—to daniel.sinykin@emory.edu and jwinant@reed.edu by March 15.

CALL FOR PITCHES

@dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and I are at work on a new version of Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century aimed at a more general audience.

We’re looking for new contributions: your model close readings of texts, canonical and not, from literary studies and not.

Details below!

I didn’t think “broccoli head” described much of anything and then I went to a gym in southwest Florida.

“suspected” lmfao literally no one at Fox News speaks Spanish?

It was transforming the biggest NFL stage in the world into a sugar cane plantation that did it for me.

Like, the multiple layers of turning an American icon into a plantation and highlighting the history of exploitation of Black and Brown bodies by the NFL and American colonialism simultaneously?

Wasn’t that Blue Ivy? 😬

She gives literally the entire game away and pretends she doesn’t know the rules.

This coward doesn’t want anyone to know who she is because she doesn’t want people to know her novels are written this way.

Just remembering when I had to explain what happened at the end of Janet Jackson’s halftime show performance to my students because none of them were alive to see it.

Audre Lorde told an audience in Eugene, OR in 1984: When she sees a foot on someone's neck, her reaction is not to try to understand either person's feelings. Her reaction is to ask, "How can I help you get it off?"

This is a travesty.

I’m gearing up for the release of my second book and it‘s amazing to see how much less arts and book criticism there is in America now than just 3 years ago (including no more Washington Post books section)

A Visitation of Spirits - Dead Ink Books A Visitation of Spirits is the powerful story of a popular and high-achieving sixteen-year-old boy who wrestles with the guilt of discovering who he is...

For those in the UK, just wanted to put on your radar that @deadinkbooks.bsky.social is republishing Randall Keenan’s first novel, A Visitation of Spirits, as part of their Outside Classics series and yours truly has written the introduction. Pre-order your copy today!

This has been the best and the worst week of my life. And it’s only Tuesday.

CFP: CUNY English Student Association Graduate Conference on Beauty, Pleasure, Value. Proposal deadline 2/20.

ASAP/17: Get It Together! Madison, WI | October 15-17, 2026

Happy February! Now’s a great time to submit your proposals for ASAP/17!

www.artsofthepresent.org/conference/3...

Sarah Dowling, "Here Is a Figure: Grounding Literary Form" (Northwestern UP, 2025) - New Books Network Also Hosted By Alix Beeston

NBCC member Sarah Dowling was interviewed by Alix Beeston on her podcast for the New Books Network about their book "Here Is a Figure: Grounding Literary Form," a work of literary criticism that gathers together the lying-down figures in contemporary literature:

Never mind the jobs you had, five classes you took in college:

1. Interracialism in American literarure
2. Irish Modern Lit
3. Scuba Diving
4. Intro to Geology
5. Beginner’s Tumbling

Wifredo Lam

For 4Columns, I wrote about the Wilfredo Lam show at MoMA. He was the first Cuban artist to enter the collection, but his masterpiece, The Jungle, hung near the coatcheck for years. It’s a great show about an artist who saw his practice as an act of decolonization. 4columns.org/d-souza-arun...

all while cutting PhD spots. loser stuff. www.ctinsider.com/news/educati...

Wondering what this course change entails when they’re still *checks notes* tear gassing preschools.

I don’t make the rules! I just very strictly enforce them. 🙃

Okay but your student is absolutely correct.

On the one hand, composting is good. On the other hand, composting costs money. My enlightened centrism suggests no composting for some, miniature flags about composting for all!”

Well that’s auspicious…

Do it for the culture.