Rupi Kaur. Photo: Baljit Singh At the New Republic, Rumaan Alam declares Rupi Kaur, author of Milk and Honey and The Sun and Her Flowers, the “writer of the decade.” Kaur’s writing is “not itself to my taste,” writes Alam. Nonetheless, “Kaur’s achievement as an artist is the extent to which her work embodies, formally, the technology that defines contemporary life: smartphones and the internet.” Random House’s One World imprint has purchased Wes Moore’s Five Days: The Fiery Reckoning of an American City, a report on the protests that seized Baltimore in the wake of the death of Freddie

Elif Shafak. Photo: Zeynel Abidin 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World author Elif Shafak talks to the New York Times’s “By the Book” column about surveillance capitalism, books she wishes had never been written, and what to read to understand modern-day Turkey. “Read women writers, women journalists, women poets, women academics,” she said. “Turkey is a country of collective amnesia. Read those writers who bear witness to the silences and to the silenced.” The Guardian looks at books that defined the last decade, including Michael Lewis’s The Big Short, Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, and Sally Rooney’s Normal

Elle profiles the New York Times’s investigative editor Rebecca Corbett. Corbett oversaw the paper’s reports on the allegations against Harvey Weinstein, and journalists Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey consider Corbett to be a crucial third member of their team, calling her their “true north.” The Elle story makes Corbett’s dedication clear: She usually begins editing after a full day of meetings and sometimes works through the night. Before joining the Times in 2004, Corbett was an editor for more than twenty years at the Baltimore Sun, where she supervised two Pulitzer Prize–winning projects and mentored David Simon (she makes

Kiley Reid The New York Times looks back at the artists who died in 2019—including Toni Morrison, Harold Bloom, and Mary Oliver. The Times Book Review looks forward to the most anticipated works of 2020, including Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness, Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age, and a new collection of unpublished stories by Zora Neale Hurston. The Guardian explains the etiquette of giving books as gifts. At NiemanLab, journalists offer their predictions for the journalism industry in the coming year. Julia Chan writes that newsrooms need to allow reporters to take breaks, especially for those reporting on the 2020

Parul Sehgal. Photo: David Surowiecki Journalist and novelist Ward Just has died. After covering conflict in the Dominican Republic for Time and the Vietnam War for the Washington Post, Just went on to write numerous works of nonfiction and fiction, including To What End? Report From Vietnam (1968), Echo House (1997), and An Unfinished Season (2005), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. “The memoir oozes bitterness from the still weeping wounds of a man who feels betrayed,” Andrew Rawnsley writes of David Cameron’s For the Record. “This is a dull, needy book,” Parul Sehgal says of Kristen

Jenny Zhang The Dutch House author and book store co-owner Ann Patchett offers an assessment of the 2019 holiday shopping season and speculates on the best upcoming titles of 2020. The New York Times’s Concepción de León looks at writing groups started by authors like Jenny Zhang, Tony Tulathimutte, and Alice Sola Kim, among others. Zhang’s group “grew out of a need for a more supportive space than the ones she was encountering in creative-writing classes,” de León writes. “There would be, like, racist stories being put up and praised in workshops,” Zhang remembered. “I didn’t have adults or

Lauren Groff. Photo: Megan Brown The New York Times runs down television’s coverage of President Trump’s impeachment: “ABC broke into Good Times,” while former senator Rick Santorum opined on CNN that House Republican’s had been “pretty woke” back in 1989 when they impeached Bill Clinton; on CBS, “anchor Norah O’Donnell interrupted Survivor with a special report,” on Fox News, Tucker Carlson “looked grim,” while Sean Hannity called the vote a “revolting charade.” Meanwhile, NBC “included occasional cutaways, with no audio at first, to President Trump speaking at a rally.” Slate has more on how conservative media covered the House

Mary H. K. Choi On the Guardian Books Podcast, Ben Lerner and Meena Kandasamy discuss autofiction and their recent books, The Topeka School and When I Hit You. After another author won an award for a story that plagiarized her own, Laleh Khadivi reflects on ownership, inspiration, and storytelling. Press Watch’s Dan Froomkin looks at the “implosion” of the New York Times’s political coverage last weekend. “Smart, capable Times reporters . . . put forth such epically, historically bad examples of pox-on-both-your-houses, boring-what-else-is-new, and self-contradictory political coverage that press critics on social media – including several former Times editors

Patricia Lockwood. Photo: © Grep Hoax Critic Peter Schjeldahl has been diagnosed with lung cancer. In a new essay for the New Yorker, he reflects on his Midwestern upbringing, alcoholism, and learning to be an art critic in public. This personal essay is “an exception” for Schjeldahl, who has never kept a diary and hasn’t done any writing “for myself” in some thirty years.“When I write,” he explains,“it’s to connect.” In this piece, he tells jokes (“Swatted a fly the other day and thought, Outlived you.”) even as he leaves us with a firm recommendation: “Take death for a

Alexander Zevin Ganesh Sitaraman is a top adviser for Elizabeth Warren. But as Politico reports, the first person thanked in the acknowledgements section of Sitaraman’s new book, The Great Democracy, is not Warren but one of her biggest rivals: “Conversations with Pete Buttigieg were invaluable, and this book wouldn’t exist without them or without his characteristically thoughtful advice, encouragement, and friendship,” Sitaraman writes. Editor and author Elisabeth Sifton died late last week. According to the obituary in the New York Times, authors she worked with included Isaiah Berlin, Don DeLillo, Ann Douglas, Susan Eisenhower, Carlos Fuentes, Philip Gourevitch, Michael

Susan Choi. Photo: Heather Weston The screen rights to Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise have been acquired by FilmNation Entertainment, which plans to develop a TV series based on the National Book Award–winning novel. “It’s been incredibly exciting to explore my book anew with such great partners,” Choi said in a statement. “They have expanded the way I see this story, the characters and its form.” J. W. McCormack is joining The Baffler as fiction editor. Out editor Phillip Picardi has left the magazine after one year,” WWD reports. Picardi’s departure follows “several rounds of layoffs, severe pay and budget

Grace Paley. Photo: Karl Bissinger Justin Taylor asks friends and colleagues to join him in reflecting on Grace Paley’s work. Her first book, The Little Disturbances of Man, was published sixty years ago. “Any story that’s worth anything will be different every time you come back to it. And every Grace Paley story is worth something. Some of them, I suspect, are worth everything,” he writes. “You re-read them and they re-read you and that mixture of revelation and return is why you do it. If this is what a haunting is I hope I never find the end

Michael Chabon. Photo: Gage Skidmore At the New York Times, Emma Goldberg looks at the decline of feminist blogs and websites. After a decade of feminist publishing, a wave of websites like The Hairpin, The Toast, and most recently, Feministing, have shut down. “It was this amazing moment where we were making careers out of blogging in our underwear. Now it’s not a good time for start-up media,” former Feministing editor and current Teen Vogue editor Samhita Mukhopadhyay said of the era. “I worry that people are afraid to align themselves with publications that are explicitly feminist.” Michael Chabon’s

Esmé Weijun Wang. Photo: Kristin Cofer Esmé Weijun Wang has signed a two-book deal with Riverhead, Entertainment Weekly reports. The announcement included details about the two upcoming titles: Soft Animals will be a novel “about a chronically ill woman who moves into a small-town lodge with her volatile husband after inheriting it from the parents of a hate-crime victim,” while The Unexpected Shape will be a nonfiction book that explores “the balance between ambition and limitation in contemporary life.” Publication dates have not been announced. The 2019 Nobel literature laureates have given their lectures. Olga Tokarczuk spoke about media,

Jia Tolentino In our favorite podcast of the week, book critic Parul Sehgal discusses Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley series with Terry Castle, Gillian Flynn, and Hanya Yanagihara. Highlight: when Alexander Chee compares Ripley to Bugs Bunny. Oprah magazine has posted a list of “31 LGBTQ Books That’ll Change the Literary Landscape in 2020.” Included on the list are novels by Garth Greenwell and Ilana Masad, poetry collections by Danez Smith and Mark Bibbins, debuts by Kate Milliken and Tomasz Jedrowski, memoirs by Jennifer Finney Boylan and Paul Lisicky, genre-defying work by Jenn Shapland, and more. Speaking of best-of lists, David

Lisa Taddeo. Photo: J. Waite The Pulitzer Prize Board has created a new Audio Reporting award category for 2020. “The renaissance of audio journalism in recent years has given rise to an extraordinary array of non-fiction storytelling,” Pulitzer administrator Dana Canedy said in a statement. “To recognize the best of that work, the Pulitzer Board is launching an experimental category to honor it.” The Guardian talks to Lisa Taddeo about nuance, intimacy, and her recent book, Three Women. “We don’t want to see ourselves sometimes,” she said of the negative reaction to her book. “I’ve always liked to see

Akwaeke Emezi. Photo: Elizabeth Wirija The 2019 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program recipients have been announced. Grantees include Jillian Steinhauer, Elvia Wilk, and more. Starting next month, Doreen St. Felix will be writing the television column for the New Yorker. The television rights to Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne novels have been bought by AMC Studios, Deadline reports. At The Believer, Sharon Marcus reflects on capitalism, bildungsromans, and Sally Rooney. “What happens to coming-of-age tales when young people who have been assigned little value beyond their capacity for labor no longer have any labor to perform?” she asks. “And

Naja Marie Aidt. Photo: Mikkel Tjellesen “I questioned myself many times: why would I take on the pain of writing this book––writing it in the middle of my raw grief, in the middle of my shock and my trauma?” Naja Marie Aidt tells John Freeman about writing her recently published book, When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back. “I didn’t want my son’s story to kind of meld into every book I would write in the future, and I also knew, most importantly, that, you know, I was completely changed as a human being, as a person,

Kristen Arnett. Photo: Maria Jones The New Yorker’s Katy Waldman lists her best books of 2019. Favorites include Kristen Arnett’s Mostly Dead Things, Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, and Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other. Two members of a Nobel Prize in Literature reform committee resigned yesterday, The Guardian reports. According to the paper, one of the departing members left because “the work to change the culture in the Swedish Academy was taking too long.” The Maris Review talks to Lane Moore about trauma, experience, and her new memoir, How to Be Alone: If You Want To, and

Australian critic, poet, and TV personality Clive James died last week. The author of many books (including Cultural Amnesia, which included appreciations of modern artists and thinkers, and a tribute to Philip Larkin), reviews, as well as pieces on Princess Diana, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and much, much more, James was funny, insightful, and deeply influential. A 2003 profile of James by A.O. Scott was titled “The Hungriest Critic of All.” According to Leo Robson in the New Statesman: “The writer I wanted to learn from was Clive James.” His writing is “alive in every phrase,” says Adam Gopnik in the