Garth Greenwell. Photo: Macmillan In BOMB magazine, a conversation between Madelaine Lucas and Jessica Au, whose new novel, Cold Enough for Snow, has won the Novel Prize. Au tells Lucas, “I often think that to really answer a serious question, I would have to write a novel to explain why I think the way I think, or what’s formed me. . . . You would need so much context and backstory to fully have another consciousness recognize your own.” In “Eric Adams’s Moral Panics,” Kay Gabriel writes for Jewish Currents about the New York City mayor’s approach to crime

Elif Batuman. Photo: Valentyn Kuzan. Jennifer Wilson reviews Elif Batuman’s second novel, Either/Or, for The Atlantic. A sequel to The Idiot, Either/Or follows Selin, now a literature major at Harvard, in her pursuit of the aesthetic life. While collecting experiences she plans to use as material for a novel, Selin ponders the “ethics of being an autobiographical-writer-in-the-making.” Wilson notes that “the simplicity of the experience-for-art’s-sake mantra is itself a clue that the cerebral Selin will soon grow suspicious of it.”  On April 13, Bennington College hosted an in-person event titled “How to Be an Art Monster.” Moderated by author

Kathryn Schulz. Photo:  Michael Polito.  At the New York Times, Alexandra Alter profiles the iconoclastic, dystopian Russian novelist Vladimir Sorokin, as American publishers plan to publish eight new translations of his books. “The attention comes as his portraits of Russia as a decaying former empire that’s sliding backward under a militaristic, violent and repressive regime have come to seem tragically prescient,” Alter writes. “As Russia carries out its brutal invasion of Ukraine, Sorokin sees the conflict not just as a military onslaught, but as a semantic war being waged through propaganda and lies—an assault on truth that writers must

Elisa Gabbert. Photo: Adrianne Mathiowetz The New York Public Library has announced the finalists for the 2022 Young Lions Fiction Award. The New York Times Book Review has dedicated an issue to poetry for National Poetry Month: Elisa Gabbert writes about the difficulty of defining exactly what makes a poem, Stephanie Burt reviews Linda Gregerson, Daisy Fried revisits the work of Nelly Sachs, and more.  The deadline for the FSG Writer’s Fellowship has been extended until April 22. The program offers support to writers from underrepresented communities including mentorship and ta $15,000 award. The judges this year are Sheila

Jennifer Egan. Photo: Pieter M. Van Hattem. Elon Musk has launched a $43-billion-dollar cash bid to buy Twitter. Bloomberg reports: “Unsatisfied with the influence that comes with being Twitter’s largest investor, he has now launched a full takeover, one of the few individuals who can afford it outright.” In The Nation, professor Victor Pickard writes about why it’s a bad idea for billionaires to have control over social-media platforms, which have become de facto public utilities.   The BuzzFeed News union has announced that it has tentatively agreed to a contract after two years of bargaining.  In the Los

Alexandra Chang. Photo: Alana Davis The National Book Foundation has announced its 2022 “5 Under 35,” the award for young authors to watch. At Vulture, Hillary Kelly discusses the nominees.  The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books is back this year with indoor and outdoor author events at the University of Southern California during the weekend of April 23–24. General admission tickets for talks with Joy Williams, Jonathan Lethem, Clint Smith, Imani Perry, Melissa Febos, and more will be available starting April 17.  At GQ, Gabriella Paiella interviews Adrien Chiles, “the internet’s most delightful columnist,” who is known for

Nina MacLaughlin. Photo: Kelly Davidson Nina MacLaughlin, the author most recently of Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung, is working on a project writing short fictions based on the sculptor Richard Serra’s 1967 list of verbs and concepts. Online at n+1, you can read an excerpt comprising three sections: “To Dapple,” “To Remove,” and “To Store.”  In the new issue of the New Yorker, comic artist Joe Sacco illustrates a story by Russian graphic artist Victoria Lomasko. In the opening panel, Sacco explains that Lomasko had to flee Moscow and leave her art supplies behind. In their collaboration, “The Collective Shame

Ocean Vuong. Photo: Tom Hines Peter Maass, the author of Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War, writes about Ron Haviv’s photographs of a Kyiv suburb, which depict cars, bicycles, strollers, and other objects abandoned by Ukrainians desperately trying to flee the war. “These photos tell us the beginnings of stories that we dread following to their ends. There is a cane on the ground—what happened to its owner? Were they scooped up by a relative who realized their grandmother or grandfather was moving too slowly to survive the bombs? Did they fall by the roadside, alone? Their body,

Hernan Diaz. Photo: Pascal Perich The new class of Guggenheim Fellows has been announced. The 2022 fellows in fiction and nonfiction include Jennifer Croft, Alexandra Kleeman, Hernan Diaz, Brandon Hobson, Maaza Mengiste, Christopher Sorrentino, and Melissa Febos, among others.  At Gawker, Erin Somers notes an uptick in critics’ use of the German term “Künstlerroman.” Somers first noticed the word in Hermione Hoby’s Bookforum review of Sean Thor Conroe’s novel Fuccboi, and has since endeavored to find the source of what seems to be a trend. According to Somers, that credit goes to Sam Lipsyte, who reminded her never to

Olga Tokarczuk. Photo: © Lukasz Giza. The International Booker Prize shortlist has been announced. The six nominees include Olga Tokarczuk and translator Jennifer Croft, who won the award in 2018 for Flights. The winner will be announced on May 26. For Vulture, Jasmine Sanders profiles Margo Jefferson, the author of the new memoir Constructing a Nervous System. Sanders writes, “As a reader, I find Jefferson most enrapturing when . . . she bins her gentility for something sharper. Tending her envy, tallying slights both personal and historical, indulging her gloomier moods: the well-comported girl no more.” New York Times

Rabih Alameddine. Photo: Benito Ordonez The PEN World Voices Festival will hold an emergency summit in May in response to the war in Ukraine. More than one hundred writers will gather, and the Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov will deliver a speech “that will address threats to democracy and free expression.”  Rabih Alameddine has won this year’s PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for his novel The Wrong End of the Telescope, which follows a transgender doctor working in Lesbos at a camp for Syrian refugees. “In a year of stunning and important fiction,” judges Eugenia Kim, Rebecca Makkai, and Rion Amilcar

Chloé Cooper Jones. Photo: Andrew-Grossardt Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal has announced that Elon Musk is joining the board of the social-media giant. Musk began his tenure with a Twitter poll asking if users want an “edit” function, which garnered an overwhelming response.  Chloé Cooper Jones talks about her new memoir, Easy Beauty: “There is this idea from the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch that I use very explicitly in my narrative but then also implicitly, in the structure and craft of the book. Put simply: Iris Murdoch argued that we can only perceive things based on the way that

Roxane Gay. Photo: Jay Grabiec Roxane Gay has announced the first three books that will be published by her new Grove Atlantic imprint: And Then He Sang a Lullaby, the debut novel from twenty-three-year-old Nigerian writer and activist Ani Kayode Somtochukwu; J. V. Lyon’s novel Lush Lives; and Hot Springs Drive, a novel from Lindsay Hunter, the author of Ugly Girls and Eat Only When You’re Hungry. Larua Miller writes about Mick Herron’s “hilarious, unique” spy novels, which are the inspiration for the new TV series Slow Horses, starring Gary Oldman, Kristin Scott Thomas, and Jonathan Pryce. “If James

Richard Howard. Photo: New York Institute for the Humanities Richard Howard, former poet laureate of New York, essayist, and translator of Roland Barthes, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Charles Baudelaire, Simone de Beauvoir, and many other French writers, died on Thursday at the age of ninety-two. His 1969 collection, Untitled Subjects, which presents dramatic monologues given by fifteen Victorians and Edwardians, won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. As the editor of George Braziller’s publishing house’s poetry series, he championed younger poets including Charles Simic and Frank Bidart; he was also poetry editor of the Paris Review in the 1990s and early

Anuk Arudpragasam. Photo: Halik Azeez The Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize shortlist has been announced. The nominees include Anuk Arudpragasam, Brandon Taylor, Patricia Lockwood, and more. You can hear Arudpragasam discuss the nominated book, A Passage North, with Megha Majumdar as part of Bookforum’s “No Wrong Answers” video series.    The New York Review of Books has just published its spring books issue, with Merve Emre on Elizabeth Hardwick, Nicole Rudick on Sarah Manguso, Jackson Lears on Samuel Moyn, and more.  In the New York Times, Alex Vadukul profiles Matthew Gasda, the playwright behind the underground hit Dimes Square, and

Margo Jefferson. Photo: © Claire Holt Yale has announced the eight winners of its international Windham-Campbell Prizes, each of whom will receive $165,000 to support their writing. The awardees in fiction are Tsitsi Dangarembga and Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu, in nonfiction Margo Jefferson and Emmanuel Iduma, in drama Winsome Pinnock and Sharon Bridgforth, and in poetry Wong May and Zaffar Kunial.  Oregon Public Broadcasing’s Jenn Chávez profiles Street Books, a mobile library run by a small team in Portland to provide books to people experiencing homelessness. Ben Hodgson, one of the library’s first regular patrons, has now co-authored a book,

Hanif Abdurraqib. Photo: Megan Leigh Barnard Hanif Abdurraqib talks with The Fader about the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s spring concert series, which he curated this year. The programming focuses on the oral tradition, “and I don’t just mean singing words out loud,” Abdurraqib said. “I mean folks who are using both sound and language to tell cohesive stories, be that in a very tactile sense, like Nikki Giovanni, or by stitching together narratives through a body of music, like Little Simz.” For the New Yorker, Jennifer Wilson profiles Duke University Press editor Ken Wissoker. Wilson writes, “Wissoker heads one

Claudia Rankine. Photo: John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Citizen author Claudia Rankine’s play Help, which is “​​derived from Rankine’s deep inquiry and ongoing investigation into white dominance,” is in previews at The Shed in New York.  Viking has announced that it will publish a collection of letters by John le Carré, titled A Private Spy, on November 8. According to a report by the Associated Press, the book will include correspondence with “Ralph Fiennes, Hugh Laurie and Alec Guinness, the actor famed for playing le Carré’s fictional spy, George Smiley, in adaptations of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Lynne Tillman. Photo: Craig Mod For The Point, Vikrant Dadawala writes about Abdulrazak Gurnah, the 2021 Nobel Laureate in Literature, how the Anglo-American press reacted to his win, and why his work should be read. European colonialism in eastern Africa is a major theme of his writing, but Dadawala emphasizes that “European languages and maps do not mark the limits of Gurnah’s literary universe. What really haunts Gurnah’s prose is the centuries-long layered history of Arab and Indian presence on the Swahili coast.”  Lynne Tillman’s next novel will be published by Peninsula Press in October. According to the publisher,

Gary Indiana. Photo: Hedi El Kholti/Seven Stories Press In the “New Books” column at Harper’s Magazine, Claire Messud writes about Gary Indiana’s essay collection, Fire Season: “It’s true that Indiana’s work can feel not wholly contemporary, insofar as it refuses ever to be nice. This, thank goodness, ensures its timelessness.”   Today is the first full day of programming at the AWP conference and bookfair, which is being hosted this year in Philadelphia. You can browse the panels on offer here. Fireflies Press has announced Dennis Lim’s new book, Tale of Cinema, on Hong Sangsoo’s film of the same name.