Rowan Ricardo Phillips, a poet and the author of The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey, has won the 2019 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing.
Philip Roth’s Upper West Side apartment just went on the market for $3.2 million.
At the New Republic, Josephine Livingstone writes about James Lasdun’s new novel Afternoon of a Faun, and wonders: “Can a man write a great #MeToo novel?”
Electric Lit has interviewed George Saunders about his experiences of contributing to the New Yorker. At first, he says, he didn’t know what he was doing: “They sent me a really nice rejection. I was such an idiot that I didn’t know it was kind of an invitation to rewrite the ending of the story, so I just sort of rejected their semi-acceptance.” But he eventually was published there, and has contributed to the magazine for decades now, all the while honing his approach. The author recalls a breakthrough he had while writing “Sea Oak”: “It was the first time I realized that if you’re writing a good story, it rebels a little bit, and it rebels mostly against your early and too-simplistic version of it.”
This week, Henry Holt paid a reported six figures for New York Times correspondent and Pulitzer Prize winner Jeffrey Gettleman’s The Mission. The book will tell the story American missionary John Allen Chau, who recently traveled to a remote island in the Indian Ocean, hoping to convert the inhabitants to Christianity, but instead was killed. The publisher has compared Gettleman’s book, due out in 2021, to John Krakauer’s Into the Wild and David Grann’s The Lost City of Z.