A new report from PEN America lists the “arcane and arbitrary” titles that prisons are banning inmates from reading. In New York, “authorities tried to ban a book of maps of the moon, arguing that it could ‘present risks of escape,’” while Florida prisons “have prevented inmates from reading Klingon dictionaries and a colouring book about chickens,” and Texas prisons “have a banned list of more than 10,000 books by authors including Alice Walker, John Updike, George Orwell and Joyce Carol Oates.”
Wall Street Journal reporters Maureen Farrell and Eliot Brown are working on a book about WeWork and the company’s former CEO Adam Neumann for Crown.
At Longreads, Adam Morgan talks to Jacqueline Woodson about Brooklyn, Prince, and her playlist while writing her new novel, Red at the Bone.
Literary Hub looks at the betting odds for the 2018 and 2019 Nobel Prizes for Literature, which will be announced on Friday. Top picks include Anne Carson, Can Xue, Haruki Murakami, and Margaret Atwood.
“I think it’s a singular curse of writing that you can get to the end … of 600 pages and realize that for the moment you really have nothing to show for it because it wasn’t the right thing,” Téa Obreht tells the First Draft podcast. “It doesn’t mean that you haven’t grown and developed in certain ways. You’ve checked out certain routes on the map and they didn’t lead to where you thought but that’s progress.”