Footnotes, November 2020: Book links from around the web

At The Reading List, we’re trainspotters when it comes to interesting book links, and here are a number that caught our eye.

How could we not lead with this extraordinary story from the US? Stacy Abrams, a Black American Democrat who ran for governor of Georgia and was defeated by the narrowest of margins amidst much Republican skullduggery, started a voting rights organisation that helped add some 800,000 voters to the Georgia roll in time for the presidential election, thus helping swing the state to Joe Biden and make him president elect – this same Stacy Abrams is a bestselling romance novelist under the nom de plume Selena Montgomery, and has a new crime thriller, When Justice Sleeps, coming out under her own name later this year! How you like that!
Speaking of the US, thanks to Masha Gessen at The New Yorker, we now have a link to America’s present moment and a troubling 1930s poem by Osip Mandelstam, ‘Stalin’s Epigram’.
Over at the LRB, SA’s Rosa Lyster reviews Diane Cook’s Booker-shortlisted first novel, The New Wilderness. Lyster herself has a book coming out, in 2022, on the global water crisis.
How come so much autofiction is so white? asks Tope Folarin.
Is Kenyan fiction experiencing a renaissance after decades of authoritarianism? asks Nanjala Nyabola.
Two key tributes on writers who died this year that you must not miss are: this one on Myesha Jenkins, and this one on Harry Garuba.
Here are some other people’s lockdown reads.
And here is a review of Arsene Wenger‘s memoir, My Life in Red and White, in a serious publication.
Finally, spend a minute contemplating all of life’s little wrongs with this fellow and his cup of coffee.