Contact: Caitlin Graf, The Nation, press [at] thenation.com, 212-209-5400
“The first thing I noticed about Benjamin Moser was that I loved the way he wrote,” says Nation editor D.D. Guttenplan. “So when I found out he was looking for a journalistic home, I leapt at the chance to ask him to become a Nation contributing writer. The Nation is a serious magazine, but I’ve never viewed politics and pleasure as incompatible. Indeed, you could make a case—and maybe we will—that combining politics and pleasure is what ‘liberation’ means. In any case, I am delighted to welcome Ben to our pages—and to the fight.”
“I’ve been reading The Nation since I was a teenager—trying to figure out what role, if any, writers and artists could play in social change,” adds Moser. “And that’s what I’m looking forward to exploring: the intersections between culture and politics, and the ways intellectual and literary life collide with the so-called real world.”
Born in Houston, Moser is the author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book of 2009. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017, and his latest book, Sontag: Her Life and Work, won the Pulitzer Prize. He was previously a columnist at Harper’s Magazine and The New York Times Book Review.
In the course of his career, Moser has taken readers to unexpected and amazingly rich places: From Clarice Lispector’s Brazil to Susan Sontag’s unhappy childhood, the interior landscape of Dutch paintings, Portuguese-speaking Africa, and eventually even to his native Houston. His work for The Nation will continue this trajectory, uniting a capacious intellect with lyrical writing in several features each year.
The Nation’s incisive cultural coverage has championed progressive values and long celebrated the crisscrossing of art, literature, politics, and society. Moser joins a host of Nation writers committed to marking the ways in which culture and politics are intimately interwoven, and how they inform our broader society.
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ABOUT: Founded by abolitionists in 1865, The Nation has chronicled the breadth and depth of political and cultural life, from the debut of the telegraph to the rise of Twitter, serving as a critical, independent, and progressive voice in American journalism.
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