Mahogany L. Browne. Photo: Curtis Bryant. Mahogany L. Browne talks with Literary Hub about a new collection of Audre Lorde’s essays and speeches, Sister Outsider: “I have found Black authors constantly fueled by Lorde’s work but also diminished when they find their ‘allies’ aren’t as familiar with Lorde as they are of, say Foucault. And so, I see a constant effort of leveling the playing field (culturally, economically and socially) resulting in a fractured mindset of ‘wokeness’ and well-meaning folks.” At The Cut, Emily Gould writes about working for Gawker in the late-2000s, and revisits the time she was

Ariana Reines. Photo: Nicolas Amato Ariana Reines has won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for her new collection, A Sand Book. Discussing her work with Sasha Frere-Jones for Bookforum last winter, Reines observed, “People have different kinds of understandings of form and structure and accuracy. This is especially true of an art like poetry, which is so liquid. It can be about anything, it can take any form, and you don’t have to pay anybody for equipment.” At Poynter, Mel Grau details the nearly two-year fight at the Boston Globe for a better family-leave policy. Six women journalists led

Joseph Pierce A partnership between Report for America and the Native American Journalists Association will support nineteen reporters covering indigenous issues this year. As Neiman Lab points out, less than one half of one percent of journalists are Native. Professor Joseph Pierce outlines an approach for being an effective reporter in Native communities: “You build trust through listening and through recognizing other people’s knowledge. . . Talking with elders about history is history. It’s not like some tall tale. It’s not an opinion. Granting communities agency over their own stories has really broad impacts, not just on self-perception, but

Hilary Mantel. Photo: Els Zweerink The Guardian has published the exclusive first excerpt from Hilary Mantel’s much-awaited The Mirror and the Light, the third and final installment of her series of historical novels featuring Thomas Cromwell. The paper also has an interview with Mantel, who says she finds it amusing that people have claimed that The Mirror and the Light was delayed because she has writer’s block. “I’ve been like a factory!” She also scoffs at the suggestion that the novel’s completion was difficult because she didn’t want to kill off Cromwell. “It’s not something I’ve ever said; it’s

Ada Calhoun. Photo: Gilbert King On The Maris Review, Maris Kreizman talks to Ada Calhoun about Generation X, making choices, and her new book, Why We Can’t Sleep. “I think the stigma is gone from things in a way that people can make a lot of different choices, like having kids or not having news. Living in the country or in the city. Getting married or getting divorced,” she said. “There is a liberation in that, but it is true that because everything is possible the pressure does increase on each individual woman to make the right choice for

Namwali Serpell. Photo: Peg Skorpinski The Aspen Words Literary Prize shortlist was announced yesterday. The nominees are Christy Lefteri’s The Beekeeper of Aleppo, Brian Allen Carr’s Opioid Indiana, Nicole Dennis-Benn’s Patsy, Bryan Washington’s Lot, and Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive. The winner will be announced at a ceremony in April. The Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalists were also announced yesterday. Nominees include Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift, Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School, and, in the newly added Science Fiction category, Marlon James’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf. Walter Mosley will receive a lifetime achievement award. The winners will be

Julia Phillips. Photo: Nina Subin Golden Gates author Conor Dougherty lists the books that helped him write his study of the Bay Area’s housing crisis. “Anytime you read a book, even a bad one, you see someone do something you hadn’t thought of before, and it informs how you approach your next piece,” he writes. Selections include Matthew Desmond’s Evicted, Nikole Hannah-Jones’s Living Apart, and Walter Mosley’s White Butterfly. Pittsburgh’s African American Cultural Center is creating a permanent exhibit about playwright August Wilson. Opening later this year, August Wilson: A Writer’s Landscape will be arranged in three parts based

Brandon Taylor. Photo: Bill Adams The reclusive writer Charles Portis—author of Norwood and True Grit, among other novels—has died at the age of eighty-six. The New York Times characterizes his work as a mix of “deadpan humor, oddball characters and occasional bursts of melodrama.” For more on Portis, see Ed Park’s 2003 essay from The Believer: “Like Cormac McCarthy, But Funny.” At The Outline, Leah Finnegan makes the case for why “We Should All Read more Jenny Diski”: “The casual frankness with which Diski writes is striking, and a necessary tonic in a media landscape prone to making everything

Andrea Bernstein. Photo: Matthew Septimus. Conde Nast’s entertainment division is launching television and film studios for five magazines: the New Yorker, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Wired and GQ. Each studio will identify editorial projects for screen adaptations and podcasts. New Yorker Studios will produce “Spiderhead” for Netflix, a series based on the George Saunders short story. The McClatchy Company, which publishes thirty local newspapers across the country, is filing for bankruptcy. The newspaper chain is more than $700 million in debt. The proposal has hedge fund Chatham Asset Management running McClatchy as a private company. At LitHub, a conversation with

Hamed Aleaziz The New Republic is redesigning its print edition, introducing a metered paywall to its website, and has launched a new podcast, The Politics of Everything. Editor Chris Lehmann said that the new look has a “strong editorial message at the heart of it. The New Republic was created to address industrial capitalism and the rise of consumer culture . . . and in many ways we are facing many similar challenges in the age of Donald Trump A man has been charged with the muder of Irish journalist Lyra McKee, who was shot last year during a

Jenny Offill In the New York Times, Lucinda Rosenfeld reviews Adrienne Miller’s In the Land of Men, a memoir about working for men’s glossy magazines such as Esquire and GQ in the 1990s and her conflicted feelings about David Foster Wallace. Reuters has created a virtual sports-reporter powered by artificial intelligence. Synthesia, a firm that worked on the project, told reporters, “AI-generated content will be a cornerstone of the media landscape in the coming decade.” (In the meantime, you can ask Siri questions about the election.) Reuters is also launching a fact-checking business and will work for Facebook to

Jenn Shapland. Photo: Christian Michael Fildardo At the New York Times, MJ Franklin talks to Brandon Taylor about short stories, choosing between science and writing, and his new book, Real Life. Before attending the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Taylor was a Ph.D. student in biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin. “I have this very technical approach to almost everything,” he said. “If there is a problem, I first determine the parameters of the problem, and then I try to lay out a very systematic way of doing it.” Doubleday has bought a debut novel by literary agent Rachel Yoder. Nightbitch

Sally Rooney. Photo: © Jonny L Davies Marie L. Yovanovitch, the ambassador to Ukraine removed from her post last spring, is writing a book, and is being represented by the Javelin literary agency, which also represents John Bolton, James Comey, and the anonymous Trump administration official who wrote A Warning. A new annual literary prize will provide more than $100,000 to women and nonbinary writers living in the US or Canada. The prize, named after the late Pulitzer-winning Carol Shields, author of the novel The Stone Diaries, will start in 2022. The BBC has posted “everything you need to

Lidia Yuknavitch Marilynne Robinson will publish the next installment of her Gilead series this year. According to the book listing, “Jack tells the story of John Ames Boughton, the black sheep of his family, the beloved and grieved-over prodigal son of a Presbyterian minister in Gilead, Iowa, a drunkard and a ne’er-do-well.” Jack will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux next October. Lidia Yuknavitch tells Literary Hub about her favorite books, the best writing advice she’s ever received, and her new book, Verge. Yuknavitch offers two pieces of writing advice: “Never surrender (Ken Kesey), and when dragged under,

Jenny Offill. Photo: Gwint For the New York Times Magazine, Parul Sehgal profiles Jenny Offill, whose new novel Weather is out next week. “Offill doesn’t write about the climate crisis but from deep within it. She does not paint pictures of apocalyptic scenarios; she charts internal cartographies. We observe her characters’ lurching shame, despair, boredom and fatigue — solastalgia experienced in ordinary life, vying with the demands of aging parents, small children, the churn of the mind,” Sehgal writes. “What she is doing, her friend the novelist Adam Ross told me, is coming as close as anyone ever has

Miranda Popkey. Photo: Elena Seibert Emily Gould and Ruth Curry are shutting down their publishing imprint, Emily Books. “When we launched the first Emily Books website, in 2011, all we knew was that we wanted to make a certain kind of book more widely available. . . . We wanted to celebrate narratives that took place outside of convention, outside of heterosexuality, outside of a world that men controlled,” they wrote in their announcement. “While we’re thrilled that the voices and stories we’ve been championing for years have lately become more ‘marketable,’ it’s made it harder for us to

Edwidge Danticat. Photo: Lynn Savarese Literary critic, professor, and novelist George Steiner has died at the age of 90. Steiner wrote over twenty books and was the New Yorker’s senior book reviewer for three decades. “Admirers of Mr. Steiner found his erudition and his arguments brilliant,” the New York Times writes. Edwidge Danticat has won the 2020 Vilcek Prize for Excellence in Literature. Danticat will receive the award at a ceremony in New York this spring. Melissa Harris-Perry is joining Zora Magazine as editor at large. Washington Post employees say that the recent suspension of reporter Felicia Sonmez is

Mary Higgins Clark. Photo © Bernard Vidal Best-selling suspense novelist Mary Higgins Clark died on Friday. She wrote more than fifty novels, and has sold more than one hundred million books. A cybersquatter has hijacked the website of novelist Patrick DeWitt, author of The Sisters Brothers and French Exit. The squatter will give the domain back to its rightful owner on one condition: DeWitt must read the squatter’s unpublished novel, In God’s Silence, Them Devils Sang. The Mellon Foundation has given a $4.5 million grant to the Academy of American Poets. HBO has released the first trailer for David

Wendy C. Ortiz. Photo: Meiko Takechi Arquillos The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has given a grant of $4.5 million to the Academy of American Poets. The money will be used “to fund its poet laureate program for the next three years,” according to the New York Times. “I have so much faith in the leadership of the Academy of American Poets, in the whole concept of the poets laureate project, and in what I think is poetry’s underrecognized ability to communicate with outsized power,” Mellon Foundation president Elizabeth Alexander said. “One thing I can promise you . . .

Tishani Doshi. Photo: Carlo Pizzati The New York Times Book Review looks at the most anticipated books to be published in February. Highlights include Emily Nemens’s The Cactus League, Gish Jen’s The Resisters, and Jenny Offill’s Weather. At Literary Hub, eighty-two writers have signed an open letter asking Oprah Winfrey to remove Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt from her book club. “Writing fiction is essentially impossible to do without imagining people who are not ourselves. However, when writing about experiences that are not our own, especially when writing about the experiences of marginalized people, still more especially when these lived