Jill Filipovic Jill Filipovic is writing a new book. OK Boomer: Let’s Talk: Dispatches from a Generational Divide will “look beyond the ‘humorous meme’ and explore issues such as student debt, healthcare and climate change.” OK Boomer will be published by One Signal Books in late 2020. The New York Public Library has released its list of the one hundred best books of 2019. The top ten includes Sally Rooney’s Normal People, Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, and Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Thick. At Literary Hub, Tarisai Ngangura explores the storytelling legacies of Jay-Z and Rakim and reflects

Amitav Ghosh. Photo: Ivo van der Bent Amitav Ghosh talks to First Draft about what he wants readers to take away from his new novel, Gun Island. “I want them to come away with . . . the sense that the world is much stranger than we think, and the ways in which our world is changing is itself very strange, very uncanny, and very disturbing,” he said. “We have to try to grapple with it and make sense of it.” In the New York Times Book Review, Parul Sehgal looks at how women’s anger has featured in the

Christopher Hitchens Eric Banks and Robert Boynton have started posting recordings of lectures that have been given at the New York Institute for the Humanities. A few highlights so far: Ryszard Kapuscinski’s 2004 discussion of Herodotus, Susan Sontag’s 1977 lecture on “Illness as Metaphor,” and James Fenton’s interview of Christopher Hitchens about the latter’s memoir Hitch-22. You can find those recordings and more here. The New York Times spotlights New Jersey’s Montclair Book Center, a 9,000-square-foot “throwback to a funkier, more literate time,” which is stocked with hundreds of thousands of best sellers, hidden treasures, and titles you “don’t

Deborah Levy. Photo: Sheila Burnett Betrayal: The Life and Lies of Bernie Madoff author Andrew Kirtzman is writing a biography of Rudy Giuliani. “Giuliani has led an operatic life,” Simon Schuster editor Bob Bender said in a statement. “Andrew has been writing about him since his days as a City Hall reporter in the 1990s, and has an intuitive understanding of this extraordinarily polarizing figure. It’s a perfect match of author and subject.” The still-untitled book will be published in 2021. At Vanity Fair, Maris Kreizman explains why the big-five publishers continue to publish works by controversial right-wing authors.

Susan Choi The winners of this year’s National Book Awards have been announced. Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise won the fiction prize, Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House won the nonfiction prize, and Laszlo Krasznahorkai and Ottile Muzlet won the translated literature prize for Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming. After a three-year hiatus, Trump has selected the winners of the National Medal of the Arts and the National Humanities Medal, the New York Times reports. Honorees include “the actor Jon Voight, the novelist James Patterson, the musicians of the United States Military and the conservative think tank the Claremont Institute.” HarperCollins is

Sarah M. Broom. Photo: Adam Shemper At the Paris Review, Sarah M. Broom reflects on money, unfinished work, and how she wrote her debut memoir, The Yellow House. “I thought, at first, that I would simply follow the chain of the title to write an autobiography of a house. I had no idea of the tentacles, the ways in which the story would transfigure,” she writes. “After several halting years, stopping to earn money in order to write, I began to work less toward my vision and more toward the book that I could afford. How, I wondered, could

Julia Phillips Random House editor in chief Andy Ward will succeed the late Susan Kamil as the imprint’s executive vice president and publisher, the New York Times reports. In a memo announcing the move to staff, publisher Gina Centrello “noted that Ms. Kamil had expressed her hope that Mr. Ward might one day take over her role.” Knopf editorial director Robin Desser will replace Ward as editor in chief of Random House. After Swedish PEN awarded its annual Tucholsky prize to imprisoned Hong Kong bookseller Gui Minhai, the Chinese embassy in the country has told Sweden that it will

Margo Jefferson. Photo: Michael Lionstar Tonight at the New York Public Library, Darryl Pinckney will discuss Busted in New York, his new book of essays about race in America, with Pulitzer Prize–winning critic and author Margo Jefferson. In May, the writer Aatish Taseer wrote a story for Time magazine titled “India’s Divider in Chief,” which was critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Last week, the Indian government stripped Taseer of his overseas citizenship, which means that he will never be able to return to India. Now, more than two hundred and fifty writers, including Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood,

Angie Cruz. Photo: Erika Morillo The Aspen Words Literary Prize longlist was released yesterday. Nominees include Angie Cruz’s Dominicana, Steph Cha’s Your House Will Pay, Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive, and Bryan Washington’s Lot. The shortlist will be announced in February. Turkish journalist Ahmet Altan, who was released from prison last week after being imprisoned since 2016, has been rearrested “after the chief public prosecutor appealed against the decision to release” him, The Guardian reports. Columbia Journalism Review’s CNN public editor Emily Tamkin reflects on the network’s use of clever chyrons that have been praised for effectively calling out

Lucy Ellmann. Photo: Amy Jordison Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport has won the Goldsmiths prize. Judging chair Erica Wagner said the novel was a “rare thing: a book which, not long after its publication, one can unhesitatingly call a masterpiece.” Larissa Pham has sold a book to Catapult. How to Run Away will be “about intimacy and art and distances, from the miles that we travel to get away from ourselves to the impossible chasm that can exist between two people sharing a bed.” Elizabeth Bishop’s Key West home has been bought by the Key West Literary Seminar for $1.2

Toni Morrison. Photo: John Mathew Smith Tomorrow night at the New York Institute for the Humanities, Hanif Abdurraqib will present the institute’s fourth annual humanities lecture, “The Intersections of Mundane Pleasures.” In his talk, Abdurraqip “will explore how our living in and throughout the world is also an act of writing, focusing on curiosity, rigid ideas around genre, and the way living can influence and foster curiosity.” The event is free and open to the public; RSVP here. A public memorial will be held for Toni Morrison in New York later this month. The event will take place at

Jaquira Díaz. Photo: Maria Esquinca Ordinary Girls author Jaquira Díaz talks to Literary Hub about villains, music, and how she motivates herself to write. “I think of all the straight cis white men I was forced to read in school. I think of all the queer AfroLatinxs who never saw themselves in books,” she said. “I think of all the books I needed growing up.” The longlist for the Dublin Literary Award has been announced. More than 150 books are in the running for the €100,000 prize. Editorial and digital employees across two dozen Hearst magazines are unionizing, the

Stepen Dixon Associated Press sources say that former Trump adviser John Bolton has signed a book deal with Simon Schuster, for a reported $2 million. According to the New York Times, Bolton is represented by the Javelin literary agency, whose other clients include former FBI Director James Comey and the anonymous Trump administration official, whose much-anticipated A Warning will be released on November 19. Bolton’s book will, according to his publisher, be released before the 2020 elections. Novelist Stephen Dixon has died. He was eighty-three years old. The Times obituary calls him “experimental,” and his work could be thrillingly

Carmen Maria Machado. Photo: Art Streiber / AUGUST Hope Reese talks to Carmen Maria Machado about domestic violence in queer relationships, using fiction in memoir, and her new book, In the Dream House. “As a writer, both books that I have written are books that I wanted that didn’t exist, so I decided to fill that space myself,” she said. “I want 50 more books like this. I want people to write a book and say, ‘In the Dream House was insufficient, and I’m going to rewrite it in my own way.’ I want mine to be a tiny

Édouard Louis. Photo: Arnaud Delrue For The Week, Phillip Maciak reflects on the death of “the good internet” and what the loss of websites like Gawker, Deadspin, and Grantland, among others, means for writing and journalism. “What these sites represented, what they tried to mainstream — or at least fund — is done,” he writes. “Experiment after experiment has failed, not because these writers couldn’t produce extraordinary writing, but because the people in a position to value it consistently failed to know how to value it, and because those same people often failed to see those writers — who

Lindy West. Photo: Jenny Jimenez Tori Amos is writing a memoir, Entertainment Weekly reports. Resistance: A Songwriter’s Story of Hope, Change, and Courage employs “her most personal and powerful songs, using her writing process and her lyrics, to demonstrate how readers can try to steer the world back in the right direction.” The memoir will be published next May by Atria Books. “I don’t feel any kind of qualms about preaching to the choir,” Lindy West tells Longreads about her new book, The Witches Are Coming. “I get accused of that a lot and I’m like, great, the choir

Andrea Long Chu The Paris Review’s Hadada prize will be awarded to novelist Richard Ford. The prize will be presented by Bruce Springsteen at the magazine’s annual Spring Revel. Jean-Paul Dubois has won the Goncourt Prize for his novel All Men Do Not Live in the Same Way. BuzzFeed News editor Karolina Waclawiak has sold a novel. Life Events, which follows “a woman entering middle age having failed at the life she felt obligated to pursue,” will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux next spring. “As someone known a bit for writing scathing negative reviews of things, I

Dorothea Lasky. Photo: Eileen Myles Tonight, poets Dorothea Lasky and Timothy Donnelly read from their latest books, Animal and The Problem of Many, at Brooklyn’s Greenlight Bookstore. Edwin Frank reflects on the superb NYRB Classics series, for which he is the editorial director, on its twentieth anniversary. “I’m extremely suspicious of the notion [of relevance],” Frank says. “It seems to me simply to feed people back to themselves. The best art is often powerfully irrelevant. I prefer the idea of currency, which is not quite the same as relevance. A book that has currency puts our present concerns in

Crystal Hana Kim. Photo: Nina Subin At Guernica, Crystal Hana Kim reflects on translating her grandmother’s poetry from Korean into English and how the work changed her relationship with her family. “The more I tried to translate the poems, the more intimidated I became. I wanted to be exact and precise, but inherent in translation is interpretation, the translator’s own agency,” she writes. “There will always be much lost in the gaps, where one tongue does not transfer cleanly to another, but that loss can be valuable; it can help us work harder to understand one another.” Mary Ruefle

Alexander Chee. Photo: M. Sharkey Editorial employees of NBC News’s digital department are forming a union, the New York Times reports. The decision to unionize comes as Ronan Farrow’s Catch and Kill has highlighted the company’s mishandling of sexual harassment and assault allegations. “Forming a union will afford us a collective voice in decisions that will benefit the entire company, providing much-needed transparency and ensuring a safer workplace,” the organizers said in a statement. After Deadspin writers and editors spoke out against auto-play, sound-on ads running on their website, Farmers Insurance has cancelled a $1 million advertising deal with