Isabel Wilkerson. Photo: © Joe Henson Ava DuVernay will direct the Netflix adaptation of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of our Discontents. The longtime theater critic Ben Brantley reflects on his twenty-seven-year career as he gets ready to retire. In the New York Times’s “Exit Interview” column, Brantley tells Jesse Green what it feels like to be insulted by the likes of James Franco, Alec Baldwin, and Josh Brolin following critiques of their work: “I expected the blowback, and it came pretty quickly. The public put-downs from celebrity stars are to be savored, I think.” At the Covering Climate

Annette Gordon-Reed. Photo: Tony Rinaldo The American Booksellers Association is launching its “Boxed Out” marketing campaign today, with fourteen independent bookstores across the country participating in the drive to divert Amazon revenue to indies amid the ongoing pandemic and through the holiday shopping season. The campaign features storefront installations designed to mimic the look of brown cardboard boxes, and are printed with such declarations as, “Amazon, please leave the dystopia to George Orwell.” The Ford and Andrew W. Mellon foundations have named twenty creatives who will receive inaugural grants as part of their new fellowship, the Disability Futures initiative.

Don DeLillo. Photo: © Joyce Ravid At the New York Times Book Review, Dwight Garner considers Don DeLillo’s new novel, The Silence. Garner remains “as attracted as anyone else to stories of doomed airplane flights and intimations of the end of the world, and DeLillo mostly held me rapt,” but admits that the 117-page story “reads like the first two chapters of a disaster novel.” In the paper’s magazine, David Marchese asked the interview-shy author why a mention of COVID-19 in an early copy of the novel was later removed. DeLillo replied: “I didn’t put Covid-19 in there. Somebody

Carlos Lozada. Photo: Bill O’Leary Joe Klein weighs in on Carlos Lozada’s new book, What We Were Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era. “In 2015, Carlos Lozada, the Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book critic, took on a harrowing task: He read eight books ‘written’ by Donald Trump. Soon, he expanded the mandate, reading everything he could about Trump and the Trump era—150 books in all. It was an act of transcendent masochism, but we should be grateful he did it because What Were We Thinking looks past the obvious and perverse—that is, past Trump himself—to the

Walter Mosley. Photo: © WideVision Photo/Marcia Wilson Best-selling crime fiction novelist Walter Mosley will be awarded the National Book Foundation’s lifetime achievement award, making him the first Black man to receive the distinction. Mosley’s work has been adapted for film and TV, and has been recognized with the Edgar Award, an O. Henry Prize, and even a Grammy. Said foundation director Lisa Lucas: “His oeuvre and his lived experience are distinctly part of the American experience.” At Slate, listen to Louise Glück, winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature, read three poems: “A Myth of Innocence,” “Crater Lake,”

Louise Glück. Photo: © Katherine Wolkoff/Macmillan Poet Louise Glück has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. For more on Glück, see Dan Chiasson’s 2012 New Yorker essay, “The Body Artist,” in which he writes: “Her poems are flash bulletins from her inner life, a region that she examines unsparingly.” At The Intercept, Peter Maass argues that Glück should refuse the prize. Criticizing the Nobel committee’s decision to award the prize to Peter Handke last year, and writing about the 2018 Academy sexual misconduct scandal, Maass obsereves, “It is laughable and tragic that an award of such influence should

N. K. Jemisin. Photo: Laura Hanifin At Literary Hub, Aaron Robertson considers the New Yorker Union’s recent victory in their campaign to end “at will” employment at the magazine. At the New Republic, Alex Shephard adds his voice to Nobel Prize speculation season. In 2016, Shephard vowed that he would eat his copy of the album Blood On the Tracks if Bob Dylan won the Nobel. (Dylan did, Shephard didn’t.) Since then, Shephard has learned to embrace the prize’s unpredictability: “The only certainty about the Nobel Committee is that it does what it wants, while the only certainty about

Akwaeke Emezi. Photo: © Scottie O. The New Yorker Union has reached an agreement with management to add a “just cause” clause to their collective bargaining agreement, ending the era of at-will employment. Senator Elizabeth Warren, representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and former attorney general Eric Holder had joined a boycott of last night’s festival events before an agreement had been reached. The president of the NewsGuild of New York, Susan DeCarava, told CNN: “I do want to give some credit to management at the New Yorker for finally being able to listen and hear what their employees were saying and

Ocean Vuong. Photo: Tom Hines The National Memo has an excerpt of Joe Conason’s preface to Without Compromise: The Brave Journalism that First Exposed Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and the American Epidemic of Corruption, a collection of writings by legendary investigative reporter Wayne Barrett (1945–2017). As a longtime writer at the Village Voice, Barrett wrote articles about city politics and corruption that “made him the scourge of City Hall, the bane of several mayors, and an essential member of New York’s pugnacious press corps.” Barrett published deeply critical books about Rudy Giuliani (Grand Illusion, 2006) and Donald Trump (Trump:

Maggie Haberman. Photo: Andrew Lih The BBC rounds up the global media’s reaction to President Trump’s positive COVID-19 test. In a story filed at 4:10 AM EST today, Alexis C. Madrigal and Robinson Meyer ponder “Now What?” In David Remnick’s report on the news, the New Yorker editor chooses his words carefully: “In the coming days, it is likely that commentators will respond to the demands of both decency and a sincere desire to wish anyone with a serious illness well and a quick recovery.” Maggie Haberman has been tweeting continuously since the news broke shortly before 1 AM,

Kevin Young. Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have decided not to participate in the New Yorker fest, acting in solidarity with the New Yorker Union, which is planning a one-night picket on Monday. The Union is asking to negotiate with management over a just cause provision in their contract. Warren and Ocasio-Cortez told the New York Times, “The NewsGuild and The New Yorker Union are fighting for basic dignity on the job, and we stand with them. We will not cross the picket line and attend the festival unless the New Yorker leadership agrees to the union’s demands—they should

Viet Thanh Nguyen Twitter rounds up global media coverage of last night’s presidential debate. The New Yorker Union has tweeted a thread about why they’ve decided to file an “Unfair Labor Practice” charge against their employers. According to the union, it wanted to discuss a just cause provision but management “walked away from negotiations.” The thread goes on to share five examples of “bosses’ unprofessional behavior.” The Booker Prize award ceremony has been postponed two days to accommodate the publication of Barack Obama’s much-anticipated memoir. Gaby Wood, the Booker Foundation’s literary director, said in a statement that the unusual

Yaa Gyasi. Photo: Penguin Random House At Nieman Lab, a guide to covering a contested election. The National Task Force on Election Crises have created resources for newsrooms for the days and weeks following November 3rd, when the election result may not yet be clear. Tonight, the New Republic’s salon series continues, with a Brooklyn Book Festival Bookend event featuring Yaa Gyasi. Via livestream, Gyasi will talk with novelist and critic Rumaan Alam about Gyasi’s new novel, Transcendent Kingdom. Literary Hub runs down fourteen new books to read this week, including Marilynne Robinson’s Jack, Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism, and

Namwali Serpell. Photo: Peg Skorpinski Upon learning that she had won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for her first novel, The Old Drift, the US-bazed Zambian writer Namwali Serpell announced that she would donate the prize money to the Louisville Community Bail Fund, which assists protestors of Breonna Taylor’s murder by the police. She has also pledged to split the fee for her Harper’s story “The Work of Art” with the magazine’s unpaid interns. Print-book sales continue to grow, with unit sales 16.4 percent higher in the week that ended on September 19 than in the same week of

Beverly Glenn-Copeland. Photo: Juri Hiensch The New Republic’s Jo Livingstone talks with Beverly Glenn-Copeland, the septuagenarian electronic musician who is finally getting his due. As a child, he was “obsessed” with science fiction, especially novels “that posited the existence of silicon-based life out there in the universe, as opposed to the carbon-based life forms we are.” He first began experimenting with computers because they require silicon to function. For the Boston Review, historian Jefferson Cowie contextualizes the white American melodrama that “the government is not just coming for your guns, it’s coming for your freedom—the freedom to dominate others.”

Eddie S. Glaude Jr. In “This Isn’t Justice,” Angelina Chapin writes about the indictment of former police officer Brett Hankison on charges of “wanton endangerment” in the killing of Breonna Taylor. Chapin points out that Taylor’s name is not directly referenced in the charges, which center on a shattered glass door in an apartment adjacent to Taylor’s. Chapin writes, “The woman whose death helped to galvanize mass protests and a racial reckoning in America was quite literally erased by the justice system.” Poynter looks at how the media covered yesterday’s grand jury ruling on the Taylor case. BuzzFeed News

Jill Lepore. Photo: Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard University The Nation has redesigned its print magazine to feature 20 percent more pages in each issue and an expanded features section. “Why publish on paper at all?” Editor D. D. Guttenplan has a word. Next month’s Portland Book Festival, which will be held online on November 5th through the 21st, will feature eleven authors who were longlisted for National Book Awards this year, including Isabel Wilkerson, Jill Lepore, Rumaan Alam, and more. At the New Yorker, essayist Brian Dillon studies Joan Didion’s photo captions from her time at Vogue, and considers how her

Vivian Gornick. Photo: Mitchell Bach The National Book Foundation has announced its “5 Under 35” list of promising young writers. The Root’s 100 Most Influential African Americans list for 2020 includes writers and journalists such as Nikole Hannah-Jones, Kiley Reid, Sarah M. Broom, and Yamiche Alcindor, among others. Haymarket Books is offering a free e-book of Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition by the Debt Collective, with a foreword by Astra Taylor. For the New York Review of Books, Dayna Tortorici looks at memoirist Vivian Gornick’s life and work, and her “commitment to

Richard Wright, 1939. Photo: Carl Van Vechten/Library of Congress Irin Carmon, coauthor of Notorious RBG, remembers the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: “Only someone so stubborn and single-minded, someone so in love with the work, could have accomplished what she did—as a woman, survived discrimination and loss; as a lawyer, compelled the Constitution to recognize that women were people; as a justice, inspired millions of people in dissent.” For those looking to learn more about the life of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, legal scholar Dahlia Lithwick recommends two books. At the New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin—who has written books

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio. Photo: © Talya Zemach-Bersin Aperture magazine has announced a lineup of fall events for their new issue, “Native America.” The five virtual readings and talks will have speakers such as the issue’s guest editor, Wendy Red Star, artist Alan Michelson, photographer Martine Gutierrez, and more. The nominees for the 2020 National Book Award have been named. The nonfiction list includes Jill Lepore, Isabel Wilkerson, and Karla Cornejo Villavicencio along with seven others. In fiction, Rumaan Alam, Megha Majumdar, and Douglas Stuart (also nominated for a Booker Prize this week) were among the longlisted authors. Connie Schultz