Monday Memo

This week we're talking about:

• Our new avatar, seen above, courtesy of the artist John Donohue, of All the Restaurants fame.
• While the Prison Strike has ended, the demand for rights continues, challenged by a conscious effort to discourage institutional transparency and witness from the outside world. From APS No. 14, famed ceramicist and designer Eva Zeisel's "Prison Memoir," which details her sixteen months in prison in Russia, much of it in solitary confinement, after being swept up in a Stalinist purge. In the New York Times recently, Tayari Jones wrote about Nelson Mandela's letters from prison and the impact of incarceration on his family.
• The Village Voice ceased publishing last week, and the Baffler published a reckoning of its significance in a city where everything the concept of "the Village” meant to several generations of Voice readers—bohemia, nonconformity, one thriving avant-garde arts scene replacing another thanks to a talent pool regularly refreshed by new arrivals with more ambition than rent money, even a belief in New York itself as the nation’s cultural capital—hasn’t corresponded to New York’s reality in something like a quarter of a century; and the New Yorker resurfaced a detailed history of its origins. Times are tough for local media, and especially cultural coverage. The publication we'd love to see rise in spirit again? The East Village Eye, hands down.
• At Lit Hub, Sylvia Whitman, who inherited Shakespeare and Company and reinvented it for a new century, is profiled. Many traditions established by her father remain. For instance: "each author who sleeps at Shakespeare and Company must write a single-page autobiography for the shop’s records." For a dazzlingly evocative postcard from Paris, read Jeffrey Lependorf's "Dining with Proust" in APS No. 12.
• Last week, we had a visit from former APS intern Nicholas Hamburger, who is now living in New Orleans, and recently wrote a five-part newspaper series chronicling immigrant communities in the city (start reading here). Please note that we are now accepting applications for fall interns. Interns at A Public Space have gone on to work at CLMP, FSG, New Directions, PEN, Poets & Writers, the Studio Museum of Harlem, and Words Without Borders; to open their own bookstores; start their own reading series; establish their own small presses. You can learn more about the internship program, and submit an application, here.
  
  You can also now apply for a 2019 Fellowship, and if in New York, attend our professional development event with emerging writers this Thursday, an official event of the Brooklyn Book Festival (where we'll have a booth on Sunday). Fall classes at A Public Space Academy are enrolling now, too.