Lydia Davis. Photo: © Theo Cote Anthony J. Broadwater, who was convicted of the 1981 rape described in Alice Sebold’s memoir Lucky, has been exonerated. Timothy Mucciante, the executive producer of a planned film adaptation of Sebold’s book, played a role in bringing attention to Broadwater’s case: “I started having some doubts, not about the story that Alice told about her assault, which was tragic, but the second part of her book about the trial, which didn’t hang together.” For Thrillist, Esther Zuckerman talks with director Paul Thomas Anderson about his new movie Licorice Pizza, the San Fernando Valley’s

Sally Rooney, 2017. The Wirecutter Union is striking from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday and is asking for readers and shoppers to support a boycott of the website during that time. The strike plan comes after two years of bargaining with the New York Times Company, and, according to the union, amid continued “unfair labor practices and wage offers that significantly underpay our staff.” The union hopes to reach a deal with management by Black Friday. More than seventy writers, artists, critics, and other luminaries have signed a letter supporting Sally Rooney’s decision to not publish the Hebrew translation of

Merve Emre. Photo © Christian Nakarado Dave Hickey—legendary magazine writer and author of the essay collection Air Guitar—has died. As Christopher Knight at the Los Angeles Times notes in his appreciation, Air Guitar “is easily the most widely read book of art criticism to appear in our time.” You can read Hickey’s Bookforum column on Colson Whitehead and poker here. At Public Books, Merve Emre talks about annotating Mrs. Dalloway: “My goal was not to confront the reader with a boring, scholarly series of footnotes pointing him or her to places and dates. Instead, I wanted to help to

Lincoln Michel Today is the last day to submit books to Lambda Literary’s “Lammy” Awards. You can find submission guidelines here. At his Substack, Lincoln Michel weighs in on the latest iteration of the MFA debate: “MFAs become a stand-in for whatever trend in literature someone dislikes. I’ve seen MFAs blamed for hysterical realism, dirty realism, McSweeney’s style fabulism, autofiction, ‘identity novels,’ and everything else in-between. (Sometimes it’s claimed that whatever style is being denounced was actually a deep state CIA plot all along.)” While MFAs can be useful for individual writers, Michel argues that they “just aren’t that

Sylvère Lotringer. Photo: Iris Klein. The National Book Awards have been announced: Jason Mott has won in Fiction for Hell of a Book; Tiya Miles in Nonfiction for All That She Carried; and Martín Espada in Poetry for Floaters. The Paris Review’s editor Emily Stokes has announced that the magazine is getting a redesign, inspired by the Review’s book-size editions of the past. The new look will debut with the Winter 2021 issue, out in December. In the Chicago Tribune, John Warner offers an appreciation of Fiona McCrae, the Graywolf Press publisher who is retiring next year. Warner observes,

Patrick Radden Keefe. Photo: Lars van der Brink New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe has won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction for his book on the Sacklers, Empire of Pain. Essayist and novelist Sloane Crosley tells Entertainment Weekly about her forthcoming book, “a romantic comedy set in a new age mind control cult on the Lower East Side” called Cult Classic: “My hope is that what sets it apart from every other romantic comedy set in a new age mind control cult on the Lower East Side is that it’s also a mystery.” Zoe Hu reviews Jay

Sarah Schulman. Photo: Drew Stevens. The ACT UP Oral History Project has a new website, with nearly two-hundred video interviews with members of the AIDS activist group as well as an archive of material from The Latina/o Caucus of ACT UP New York. For more, check out Bookforum’s interview with the oral history’s co-founder Sarah Schulman and Moira Donegan’s review of Schulman’s book Let the Record Show A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993. Join us on Thursday for “No Wrong Answers: Authors in Conversation.” This free online event will feature Elias Rodriques and Robin D. G.

Edward P. Jones Novelist, journalist, and artist Etel Adnan has died at age ninety-six. Her 1978 novel Sitt Marie Rose is a classic of war fiction, and Adnan was also a prolific poet—here, you can see the author reading from her epic book-length poem, The Arab Apocalypse (1980), at the Serpentine Galleries in 2011. In the early 2010s, her reputation as a painter began to grow, culminating in this year’s exhibition of six decades of art at the Guggenheim museum. Writing about Adnan’s show at Mass MoCA in 2019, Kaelen Wilson-Goldie—author of a 2018 monograph on the artist—notes the

Brandon Taylor. Photo: William J. Adams Bryan Washington, Lauren Groff, Percival Everett, Dana Spiotta, Brandon Taylor, Joshua Cohen, and others have been long-listed for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. A new conspiracy theory is taking root on Reddit, where some are arguing that novelist Thomas Pynchon is ghost-tweeting for director Paul Thomas Anderson under the pseudonym Sam Harpoon. Spotify is getting into the audiobook business. At the Paris Review, Alex Abramovich interviews music critic and poet Joshua Clover about his new book on Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers’ song “Roadrunner”: “I didn’t choose ‘Roadrunner’ because its recording timeline

Sylvère Lotringer. Photo: Iris Klein Sylvère Lotringer, the French literary critic, theorist, and founder of the journal that grew into Semiotext(e) Press, has died at age eighty-three. Lotringer published English translations of works by the giants of French philosophy, among them Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, and Jean-François Lyotard. On Twitter, Lotringer’s mentees, readers, and students offer remembrances. Artforum’s announcement of his passing leaves us with a quote: “Though the texts he published were frequently tortuous, Lotringer abided by a simple overarching principle. ‘Never give people what they want,’ he said, ‘or they’ll hate you for it.’”

Ashley D. Farmer. Photo: Kelly Davidson The Whiting Foundation has announced the recipients of its Creative Nonfiction Grant. Among the awardees, all of whom will receive $40,000 while working on their books, are Lorelei Lee, Ashley D. Farmer, Sangamithra Iyer, and Rebecca Clarren. The New Republic’s Alex Shephard writes about the University of Austin, Bari Weiss’s proposed anti-woke college: “In general, it has more in common with Masterclass, the fake online ‘school’ where you can pay a few hundred dollars to have Carlos Santana teach you how to noodle an electric guitar into submission, than with any actual university.”

Fiona McCrae. Photo: Erin Smith Photography  Fiona McCrae, the director and publisher of Graywolf Press, has announced her plan to retire this June. McCrae led the Minneapolis press for twenty-seven years, and published books by Eula Biss, Jamel Brinkley, Leslie Jamison, Percival Everett, Layli Long Soldier, Tracy K. Smith, and more. McCrae said of her tenure, “It’s been a marvelous adventure and I am so grateful to all the incredible individuals I have had the pleasure of working with, from the exceptional staff and board to all our cherished and talented writers.” For the New York Times Magazine, Andrea

Vanessa Nakate. Photo: Paul Wamala Ssegujja. Claire Denis, the French director of Beau Travail, is currently filming her adaptation of Denis Johnson’s thriller The Stars at Noon. In the vein of Robert Stone and Graham Greene, Stars, one of Johnson’s early novels, follows an English businessman and an American woman, who fall in love in a politically volatile Nicaragua. Margaret Qualley and Joe Alwyn will play the leads. Lithub has run an excerpt from Vanessa Nakate’s A Bigger Picture: My Fight to Bring a New African Voice to the Climate Crisis, in which she describes her involvement with the

Lucie Elven. Photo: Sophie Davidson The New York Mag Union has an illustrated Twitter thread with stories from New York magazine staff who have left the magazine. Tupelo Press has announced that it will publish four manuscripts out of more than one thousand that had been submitted during the press’s open reading period this summer. J. Mae Barizo, Preeti Kaur Rajpal, Mike Lala, and Kate Partridge will each receive a $1,000 advance and will be published, promoted, and distributed by Tupelo. For 4Columns, Lauren Michele Jackson reviews the film adaptation of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing, “a story of

Damon Galgut. Photo: Marthinus Basson/Europa Editions Damon Galgut has won the 2021 Booker Prize for The Promise, published in the US by Europa Editions. The novel is the story of an Afrikaner family told over the course of three decades. Galgut had previously been shortlisted for the Book twice and is the third South African author to win the award. You can watch Galgut read from the book here. Deep Vellum Publishing is relaunching Dalkey Archive Press in Spring 2022. The company will reissue classic Dalkey titles and publish new fiction. For The Nation, Lindsay Zoladz reviews a recent

Elissa Washuta. Photo: KR Forbes The Department of Justice has sued Penguin Random House in a move to block the publisher from acquiring Simon Schuster. The DOJ’s focus on how the merger would impact the advances authors receive rather than potential effects for consumers “signals a significant shift,” the New York Times reports, in lawmaker attitudes toward corporate consolidation. The civil suit outlines how the proposed merger “would likely result in substantial harm to authors of anticipated top-selling books and ultimately, consumers.” Elissa Washuta, author of White Magic, has shared her “in-progress, reverse-chronological list of books by Native and

Robin D. G. Kelley  The new episode of Bookforum’s video series “No Wrong Answers” will debut live on November 18th with novelist Elias Rodriques and scholar-author Robin D. G. Kelley. n+1 magazine’s Bookmatch 2021 fundraiser is now live. If you make a donation during November, you’ll get a personalized reading list from n+1 contributors and associates, including Andrea Long Chu, Molly Young, Christian Lorentzen, Tony Tulathimutte, and more. The independent media organization Grist is looking for an Indigenous Affairs Fellow. The paid, full-time position offers mentorship as well as the opportunity to report on how climate change affects Indigenous

Abdulrazak Gurnah (photo: Mark Pringle) The gubernatorial race in Virginia, to be decided on Tuesday, is neck-and-neck. In the final weeks of his campaign, Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin has been criticizing his opponent, Terry McAuliffe, for vetoing (twice) legislation that would require all public-school teachers in the state to tell parents of any reading material with “sexually explicit content.” (The bill has been nicknamed “The Beloved Bill,” after the Toni Morrison novel.) McAuliffe’s response has been to the point: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” In the latest installment of his consistently annoying

Joy Williams. Photo: Anne Dalton Joy Williams has won the 2021 Kirkus Prize in Fiction for Harrow, her first novel in twenty years. Brian Broome has been awarded the nonfiction prize for his memoir Punch Me Up to the Gods. New hires have been announced at the New Yorker: Julian Lucas and Emma Green have been named staff writers, Merve Emre will be a contributing writer, Susan Orlean will be writing an obituary column (“You can expect Susan to put her own spin on it, paying homage to people known and unknown, plus animals, trees, and even inanimate objects.”),

Maggie Nelson. Photo: Harry Dodge. At The Nation, Mark McGurl talks about his new book, Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon. McGurl explains how he decided to “use Amazon to reframe our view of the contemporary literary world from as low a vantage point as possible on the prestige hierarchy. From that vantage, a lot of new things become visible—wonderfully lurid and disturbing things!” Vox Media has announced multiple promotions across the company. Among the changes are Meredith Haggerty becoming the senior editor of culture, Shirin Ghaffary being promoted to senior correspondent, and Caroline Houck