Rowan Ricardo Phillips. Photo: Sue Kwon Farrar, Straus and Giroux has announced its inaugural FSG Writer’s Fellowship, which proposes to support one emerging writer with $15,000 and mentorship in a yearlong program. Applications will open in April, and will be judged by Sheila Heti, Katie Kitamura, and Rowan Ricardo Phillips.  Following an investigation by a group of six historians, a Dutch publisher is pulling its book The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation from stores. Written by Rosemary Sullivan, the book identifies a Jewish notary named Arnold van den Bergh as the likely person who revealed the

Jacqueline Rose In the New York Times Magazine, a conversation with John Waters, whose debut novel, Liarmouth: A Feel-Bad Romance will be published in May. Waters explains how things have changed since he was younger: “We used political incorrectness as a weapon against our enemies, but we made fun of ourselves first. The trigger-warning crowd does not make fun.” The London Review of Books has published a collection of responses to the invasion of Ukraine. Among the twenty-eight writers represented are: Pankaj Mishra, writing about “global mimicry of the American way of war”; Jacqueline Rose discussing the dangers of

Cheryl Strayed Rebecca Donner—whose biography of Mildred Harnack, an American woman who became a spy and a central figure in the resistance against Hitler, just won the National Book Critics Circle Award—has sold I Am Sophie Scholl to Random House. According to the publisher, the new book “tells the inspiring story of the legendary German resistance member who was executed for treason at just 21 years old, and her anti-Nazi group the White Rose.” Yesterday, Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild turned ten, and to celebrate, the author released a scene that was cut from the published version of the book.

Jeremy Atherton Lin The winners of the National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced at an online ceremony last night. They are Clint Smith, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Melissa Febos, Anthony Veasna So, Diane Seuss, Rebecca Donner, and Jeremy Atherton Lin. As previously announced, novelist Percival Everett has been given the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, Merve Emre has accepted the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, and Cave Canem Foundation has recieved the Toni Morrison Achievement Award.   In a review of Deborah Cohen’s group biography Last Call at the Hotel Imperial for the New Yorker, Krithika Varagur writes

Sophie Pinkham In the New York Times, Sophie Pinkham writes about the intellectuals and political dissidents leaving Russia. Pinkham compares this exodus to the emigration from the Soviet Union in the 1970s: “It has been less than a month and the situation is evolving fast, but new émigrés do not expect to be greeted as warmly as their Soviet predecessors once were by the West.”  Tonight, the National Book Critics Circle will hold its award ceremony and reading for its 2022 prizes. The event starts at 5:30pm with a reading by award finalists hosted by Ophira Eisenberg.  At Jstor

Torrey Peters. Photo: Natasha Gornik For the Washington Post Magazine, Jacob Brogan reports on the decline of academia from this year’s sparsely attended Modern Language Association convention: “Surveying the state of the field, one might be wiser to find something, anything else to do—yet intelligent, well-informed people still enroll in graduate programs every year, sometimes even tromping off to conferences amid a pandemic.” Lambda Literary has announced the finalists of its 2022 Lammy Awards in LGBTQ literature. The honorees include Lauren Groff for Matrix, Brontez Purnell for 100 Boyfriends, Tiphanie Yanique for Monster in the Middle, Torrey Peters for

Rachel Kushner. Photo: Lucy Raven. Marina Ovsyannikova, a Russian journalist at a state-run network, faces charges for interrupting a news broadcast with an anti-war sign. In a video posted before the protest, Ovsyannikova said she regretted her role as an editor at Channel One: “I’m ashamed I told lies from the television. Ashamed that I let them zombify the Russian people,” before closing with defiant words, “It is in our power to stop this lunacy. Go to protests, don’t be scared, they can’t detain us all.”  Rachel Kushner is now writing the “Easy Chair” column for Harper’s Magazine. Kushner

George Saunders. Photo: Zach Krahmer Ayesha A. Siddiqi talks with New Inquiry editor Charlie Markbreiter about “the end of an era, its ‘main characters,’ web 2.0 the real difference between Gen Z and Millenials.” “The last decade of fiction starring single late 20s-early 30s white women recycles different iterations of the same boring, selfish, reckless, cynical and unmoored depressive figure with a dissatisfying sex life that they organize the rest of their lives around,” Siddiqi says. “The self-sabotaging white woman is to the 20teens what the flailing dad was to 90s family comedies, an era defining trope. These women

Eve Babitz The Huntington Library in San Marino, California has acquired the archive of artist and author Eve Babitz, who was a fixture of the LA art scene in the 1960s and ’70s. She is the author of Slow Days, Fast Company, Sex and Rage, and other cult classics, and died at the age of seventy-eight last year. According to Babitz’s younger sister, Mirandi Babitz, “When I told Eve that The Huntington was very interested in her archive, she said, ‘I would love to be with Blue Boy and Pinkie again, like when we were kids. It’s as classy

Olga Tokarczuk. Photo: © Lukasz Giza. The longlist for the 2022 International Booker Prize has been announced. The thirteen novels include work by Olga Tokarczuk, Bora Chung, David Grossman, Fernanda Melchor and more. The prize’s shortlist will be announced on April 7th and the winner on May 26th.  On the new episode of the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast, filmmaker and Forbes editorial director Katya Soldak talks about the war in Ukraine. Soldak, who grew up in the country, told hosts Whitney Terrell and V. V. Ganeshananthan, “Ukrainian people will die, but they’re not going to stop. This is the spirit that

Cormac McCarthy. Photo: Derek Shapton/Penguin Random House Cormac McCarthy has two intertwined novels coming out from Knopf this fall, his first to be published since The Road in 2006. The Passenger and Stella Maris follow siblings Bobby and Alicia Western, who “are tormented by the legacy of their father, a physicist who helped develop the atom bomb, and by their love for and obsession with one another,” Alexandra Alter reports. McCarthy, who rarely gives interviews, has been working on this project for years. In a 2009 interview, he alluded to what seems to have become Stella Maris: “I was

Yevgenia Belorusets. Photo: Olga Tsybulska. The New York Times is temporarily ceasing news operations in Russia following legislation passed by Putin’s government last week that effectively outlaws independent reporting. Other English-language outlets such as the BBC and Bloomberg News have also decided to take reporters out of Russia. Tonight, New Directions, McNally Jackson, ISOLARII, and Artforum are having a reading of work by Ukrainian writer and artist Yevgenia Belorusets. Belorusets, Margaret Atwood, Oksana Maksymchuk, Val Vinokur, Genya Turovskaya, and Ostap Kin are all expected to read (some in person and some via Zoom). You can read Belorusets’s diary from

Nadja Spiegelman. Photo: © Sarah Shatz Washington Post book critic Carlos Lozada reviews the writings of Vladamir Putin. “His motives can also be gleaned in part from his book and his frequent essays and major speeches, all seething with resentment, propaganda and self-justification,” Lozada states. “In light of these writings, Russia’s attack on Ukraine seems less about reuniting two countries that Putin considers ‘a single whole,’ as he put it in a lengthy essay last year, than about challenging the United States and its NATO minions, those cocky, illegitimate winners of the Cold War.” The debut issue of Astra,

Clancy Martin. Photo: Brandon Parigo The BBC is temporarily suspending the work of its journalists in Russia following Putin’s new censorship law. This morning, the Duma unanimously passed legislation that outlines fines and jail terms of up to fifteen years for the offence of spreading “fake” information about the Russian military’s invasion of Ukraine. Reuters reports: “Russian officials have repeatedly said that false information has been spread by Russia’s enemies such as the United States and its Western European allies in an attempt to sow discord among the Russian people.” “How you steal a book-size magazine or any book

Ha Jin. Photo: © Dorothy Greco The first issue of Astra magazine, edited by Nadja Spiegelman, will be published in April. In the meantime, the publication has posted its first cover, showing a contributor lineup including Ottessa Moshfegh, Kate Zambreno, Ada Limón, and more.  Amazon has announced that it will be closing all of its brick-and-mortar bookstores in the US and UK.  Author and preservationist Robert Hicks has died at the age of seventy-one. Hicks was the author of the bestseller The Widow of the South, among other novels, and raised money to buy and preserve a historic battlefield.

Svetlana Alexievich. Photo: Elke Wetzig/Wikimedia Commons On Thursday, PEN America will host a discussion between Ukrainian writers Andrey Kurkov, Victoria Amelina, and Vakhtang Kebuladze, who will offer their perspectives on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. More than a thousand other writers, including Orhan Pamuk, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Svetlana Alexievich, have signed PEN International’s open letter condemning the invasion and calling for peace. PEN Ukraine and PEN Belarus are holding a fundraiser to aid Ukrainian writers, journalists, scholars, translators, and artists who are evacuating their homes.  “On the Polish side of the border there’s food and water. On the Ukrainian

For The Nation, Benjamin Moser writes about Anetta Antonenko, the Ukrainian publisher of Clarice Lispector, Jorge Luis Borges, Federico García Lorca, and Georges Bataille. Moser and Antonenko became friends and colleagues when they teamed up to bring Lispector to the country where she was born. Writing now, Antonenko recommends five books to help understand the nation and tells Moser, “I’m not afraid to fight. But I believe that words are a significant contribution to our victory.”  Sheila Heti recommends six books about sex for The Week. Her choices include titles by Henry Miller, James Baldwin, Garth Greenwell, and more.

Laila Lalami. Photo: April Rocha Literary Hub has started a new series featuring contemporary poetry from Ukraine. The first column includes three poems by Iya Kiva. The New York Times has profiled Kiara Barrow and Rebecca Panovka, the founding editors of the journal The Drift. In the first issue, released in 2020, the editors wrote: “We’re committed to offering a forum for young people who haven’t yet been absorbed into the media hivemind, and don’t feel hemmed in by the boundaries of the existing discourse. These are times in which the world needs fresh voices.” Since that first issue,

Andrey Kurkov. Photo: Mariusz Kubik/Wikimedia Commons Author Jesse Lee Kercheval has passed along some recommendations for Ukrainian literature in translation. In an interview with the New York Times, the Ukrainian comic novelist Andrey Kurkov suggests Maria Matios’s novel Sweet Darusya. The American Society of Magazine Editors has named the finalists for its 2022 awards. Among the writers and stories honored are Imani Perry for her feature on Gayl Jones, E. Alex Jung for his profile of the late Anthony Veasna So, Angelica Jade Bastién for three pieces of film criticism published by New York magazine, and Carina del Valle

John Darnielle. Photo: Lalitree Darnielle. At The Baffler, Sophie Pinkham writes about the Ukrainian artist and writer Yevgenia Belorusets. Discussing one of the author’s stories, which takes place during the 2014 crisis in the Eastern region of the country, Pinkham captures the bleak mood of the narrative: “The forgotten, bombed-out towns of eastern Ukraine no longer have the privilege of even the bad kind of history. They have become a purgatory: a fate worse than oblivion.” The Story Prize has announced its longlist.  Leonard Cohen’s unpublished 1956 novel A Ballet of Lepers will be released this fall. The publication