Merve Emre

1 week ago | nybooks.com | Ben Calhoun |Merve Emre

The eighth episode of “The Art of Editing” May 27, 2025 In “The Art of Editing,” season two of the podcast The Critic and Her Publics, Merve Emre speaks with top magazine, newspaper, and book editors to discuss their careers and the work of editing. The Review is collaborating with Lit Hub to publish transcripts and recordings of each episode. Ben Calhoun has been in love with radio since he was twelve years old. After college he began working at WBEZ, Chicago’s National Public Radio...

1 month ago | nybooks.com | Sasha Weiss |Merve Emre

Sasha Weiss is the first editor I ever worked with on a reported piece, at the time a new type of assignment for me. I was writing about the mysterious Elena Ferrante and I was entirely unsure of what to do, but I soon discovered that I could put my faith in Weiss as part teacher, part therapist: She has a unique way of pushing her writers, forceful yet compassionate.

1 month ago | nybooks.com | Merve Emre |Radhika Jones

For the past seven and a half years, Radhika Jones has been the editor in chief of Vanity Fair. When she agreed to come speak with me for “The Art of Editing,” I was imagining we would talk about the annual Hollywood Issue or whether the magazine had another scandalous exposé of Cormac McCarthy up its sleeve. But one week before our conversation, she announced that she was stepping down.

2 months ago | nybooks.com | Merve Emre |Zakiya Harris

What happens when editors become the subject of satire? Zakiya Dalila Harris, who began her career as an assistant editor at Knopf Doubleday, is the author of the 2021 novel The Other Black Girl, a work of speculative fiction whose protagonist, Nella, is the only black girl, or OBG, to work as an assistant editor at a prestigious publishing imprint—until one day she notices a colleague she hadn’t before.

2 months ago | nybooks.com | Merve Emre

I Am Charlotte Simmons, which many people believe to be Tom Wolfe’s crudest and most offensive book, played an important part in my moral education. When I think about the novel now, I think about a girl who used to go to the college bookstore for the express purpose of reading it. She would pick it up from the front display table, climb to the balcony, and sit on the floor behind a large white column that was broad enough to hide her from the clerks and the customers below.