It’s been a long, hot week but the weekend is here. New books came out, some musical greats exited, and Trump and his hogmen continued to wreak havoc. Missed anything? Here are some quick Venns to keep you up to date.
Have a great weekend, and I’ll see you at the protests tomorrow!
Last night at the New York Public Library, Alexander Sammartino won the Young Lions Fiction award for his debut novel Last Acts. This was the 25th year of the Young Lions Award, which comes with a $10,000 prize.
Last Acts follows a man burdened with a failing gun store and a son recovering from a near-fatal overdose. The fragile relationship between the father and son is tested as they conspire to outrun bankruptcy and achieve some kind of American dream through a series of misadventures and hijinks.
Sammartino was selected out of a group of five finalists which also included ‘Pemi Aguda’s Ghostroots, Eliza Barry Callahan’s The Hearing Test, Santiago Jose Sanchez’s Hombrecito, and Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s Catalina.
The award ceremony at the NYPL’s midtown branch was emceed by Penn Badgley—there was a minutes-long gasp-and-chatter delay when it was announced he was hosting. Interestingly, the character Badgley played on Gossip Girl was a finalist for the Young Lions Award, which made for a meta, full circle moment. A selection from each of the finalists’ novels was read by a star-studded line-up of Tyler Foggatt, Millicent Simmonds, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Fran Tirado, and Alexa Barajas.
The New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award was created 25 years ago by Ethan Hawke, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, Rick Moody, and Hannah McFarland. Sammartino joins past winners E.J. Koh, Zain Khalid, Kalani Pickhart, Catherine Lacey, Ling Ma, and more.
We’re celebrating inter-species friendship this week. It’s a season of frogs, toads, raccoons, and genetically engineered extra-terrestrial life forms.
IRL, we’re running on gossip, post-punk, and visions of a strong local government. It’s getting hot out. So we’re skipping town when we can, and burrowing indoors when we can’t. June is apparently the month to get freaky and feel it all.
Molly Odintz has been listening to The Feelies’ “Crazy Rhythms” (1980) and is happy to report that this hypnotic post-punk album is still a banger.
James Folta recommends the latest issue of Protean. The leftie arts and criticism magazine launched its latest with an inaugural hootenanny at the Verso offices last week. “Hanif Abdurraqib, Kyle Carrero Lopez, David Buuck, and Kinsey Cantrell all read, and there were a bunch of tributes to [the late poet] Joshua Clover and readings of his work,” says James. “People should grab a copy of the magazine—it’s a great one.”
Along with the rest of the Rough Draft Books staff, Drew Broussard went to a minor-league baseball game. (Three cheers for the Hudson Valley Renegades, whose cheerful mascots Rookie, Rene, Rascal, Roofus, Rosie form what our colleague Calvin Kasulke calls a “heteronormative raccoon family.”) While Drew is personally on the fence about the church of baseball, “going to a game with a bunch of goofball friends is one of the best experiences summer has to offer.”
Oliver Scialdone took a brother to a birthday dinner this week, creating “a cool, fun, and wholesome family moment!” Brooklyners, take note: Santa Panza of Bushwick apparently reps great wood-fired pizza and craft cocktails. Also, per Oliver, the menu includes “fried squash blossoms like our nonna used to make.”
Jessie Gaynor got happy listening to Sarah Hartshorne’s You Wanna Be on Top? A Memoir of Makeovers, Manipulation, and Not Becoming America’s Next Top Model. This audiobook, read by the author, chronicles Hartshorne’s time on America’s Next Top Model. “It’s wry and gossipy and fun, and Hartshorne is a great narrator.” Adds Jessie, “we’re getting into disgusting weather for running territory where I live, and this book is good motivation to brave the swamp.”
Speaking of audiobooks, Emily Temple traveled a total of 20 hours in the car this past weekend “with a three year old, who neither complained nor slept, but demanded the audiobook of Frog & Toad Are Friends on loop.”
The twist? Those twenty four recurring minutes with master narrator Arnold Lobel were in fact a narrative treat. “‘A Swim‘ is really deep, if you think about it,” says Emily. “Which I have. For many hours.”
And speaking of three year olds, Dan Sheehan took his own triceratops to see Lilo & Stitch, Disney’s latest cash-grab live action remake. “It was, of course, terrible—wildly inferior to the original in every respect—but my daughter was entranced by it,” Dan says. “And the concessions stand, and the posters, and the popcorn. An extremely joyful outing.”
Olivia Rutigliano co-led a screenwriting workshop in Jamaica(!) put on by Strike Star Entertainment and co-sponsored by the Jamaican Ministry of Culture. Sources say this was an A+ creative adventure, involving fantastic writers and film people. “And my partner John Buffalo Mailer and I got to do it together,” Olivia says. Love made the trip extra special.
I, Brittany Allen, have been fleeing the first flickers of summer heat with a big library DVD kick. This week the two person cinema club that forms my household finally got around to watching Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala, a terrific entry to the star-crossed lovers canon. Following a Uganda-born Indian woman (Sarita Choudhury) and a Black Southern man (Denzel Washington) trying to make it work in, you guessed it, Mississippi, the film is charming and probing. You cry, you laugh, you think. And its leads may be the hottest people to ever play Romeo and Juliet.
It was bonus nice to spend time paying general homage to the filmmaker Mira Nair, who, in addition to giving the world a great cinema canon, gave New Yorkers a great mayoral candidate. Another highlight of my week was watching Zohran Mamdani (Nair’s human son!) own the debate stage. (PS, neighbors, make a voting plan!)
And that’s all there is, folks. It was a pretty bad one out there in the world, but in our hearts of hearts we’re wishing you a weekend of (happily) crazy feelings, adventures enough to force you out of the swamp, and fried squash blossoms. Just like nonna used to make.
Today, the UK’s Women’s Prize Trust announced the winner of the 30th Women’s Prize for Fiction, which “champions excellence, originality, and accessibility in women’s writing,” and is awarded to the best novel of each year written in English and published in the UK, and the winner of the second Women’s Prize for Nonfiction.
The winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction is Yael van der Wouden for her “unsettling, tightly-plotted debut novel” The Safekeep.
The winner of the Women’s Prize for Nonfiction is Rachel Clarke for her “inspiring, profoundly moving and insightful” The Story of a Heart.
Each winner will receive £30,000; as the winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Yael van der Wouden will also receive “a limited-edition bronze statuette known as the ‘Bessie’, created and donated by the artist Grizel Niven,” and as the winner of the Women’s Prize for Nonfiction, Rachel Clarke will also receive “a limited-edition artwork known as the ‘Charlotte’, gifted by the Charlotte Aitken Trust.”
If you believe the American media, two industries are responsible for the whole wheel of culture. One’s in New York and makes print matter, and one’s in Los Angeles and makes :pops in cigar: motion pictures.
Hollywood’s long been self-infatuated. Movies about movie-making predate Sunrise Boulevard and Singin’ in the Rain. But the same is true in publishing. Novels about novelists struggling to write novels have proliferated since the medium’s advent, from Joyce to Miller to Bolaño to Lerner to Chabon to Byatt to Baldwin. It’s a tale as old as time, flop era be damned. Artists and entertainers simply love to make art and entertainment about making art (and entertainment). But what’s that about, beyond personal myth-making? And, more interesting to me, does work produced about making work tease affinities, cross-medium?
I believe so. Which is why I’ve made this pairing list, to celebrate the spiritual similarities inherent to showbiz shows and publishing shows. If you like X, you might like Y. But honestly, if you’ve made it this far? You probably like ’em all.
Hacks —> Younger
Hacks explores an intergenerational workplace frenemyship in Vegas/Hollywood. Younger does the same thing, but in Brooklyn/(a barely recognizable) Bryant Park. The twisty plots of both shows hinge on recurring betrayal. And in both cases, you stick around to see how this whole mentorship situation is gonna shake out. They each have about as many inside jokes per minute, too. (For the dorkiest readers at home, Hacks’s relationship to John Oliver = Younger’s relationship to Karl Ove Knausgaard.)
This pairing is for the industry insiders.
The Studio —> The Bold Type
Here we have two love letters to glossy versions of basically bygone industries. Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s The Studio is a beautifully shot backlot hagiography with sprinkles of farce. The Bold Type, set at a fictionalized version of Cosmopolitan magazine, is about as sleek and self-conscious. Both shows launch on the premise that your dream media job is possibly not as great as it looked from the mailroom. But when it counts, both shows also skew sentimental about the powers and pleasures of conglomerate-funded storytelling.
Whether you’re a Conde Nast clacker or a d-girl with auteur dreams, this pairing is for the jaded believers.
30 Rock —> Jane the Virgin
Liz Lemon epitomized the messy mogul. Her quest to “have it all”—meaning, in TV’s own terms, the hit show and the happy family—is constantly being thwarted by the antics of her comedy show co-workers. Jane Villaneuva, the aspiring romance novelist, is about as hapless. Things keep befalling her. Like this fetus she never asked for!
There’s something bracingly un-glamorous at work in both these shows, which skewer their industries with love-laced darts. And the high absurdity suits the relatively low stakes behind making, respectively, sketch comedy and soulful smut. This pairing reminds us all to take a chill pill. Whether it’s a book or a sitcom, sometimes we’re just here to have fun.
This one’s for the goofy realists.
The Larry Sanders Show —> Love & Anarchy
There’d be no 30 Rock without its antecedent, The Larry Sanders Show. (Probably ditto Hacks, for that matter.) But this late night comedy about people making a late night comedy took itself a little more seriously. Or at least the eponymous hero did.
The Swedish import Love and Anarchy (Kärlek och anarki) also maintains a dramedic sensibility, but for the publishing biz. Extolling the series as a great pandemic binge, Emma Kantor described the latter as “filled with industry satire, office hijinks, and sexual tension.” In other words? There’s earnest chaos. Love, meet anarchy.
This pairing is for the balanced consumers.
The Comeback —> The Other Black Girl
Okay, okay, hear me out. I know Lisa Kudrow’s HBO mockumentary series about a delusional woman (Valerie Cherish) trying to reclaim her sitcom throne is, yes, a comedy. Whereas The Other Black Girl, adapted from Zakiya Dalila Harris’ 2021 novel of the same name, takes a satirical premise and then hard turns into thriller. But genre differences aside, both these projects explore scrambling for scraps, the perils of unchecked ambition, cruel industrial standards, and what a lack of solidarity (or fear of the döppelganger) can do to a single psyche.
This pairing = cautionary tales.
Call My Agent! —> Just Shoot Me
And here we return to madcap ensembles. Because whether you’re launching an acting career or a magazine, it does in fact take a village.
The French sitcom, Call My Agent!, offers a delightful, not-too-withering peek behind the old red curtain. It’s more in thrall to its characters than it is jaded. Which rhymes with a sitcom predating Peak TV—the goofy, earnest episodic about magazine makers, Just Shoot Me. Both shows remind us that before all the gloss is applied, making magazines and making television is a job. Pure and simple. And also, both shows have three words in the title. Badda bing!
Happy bingeing.
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