Valeria Luiselli. Photo: Diego Berruecos/Gatopardo G/O Media has ordered Deadspin writers and editors to not write about any subject besides sports, the Daily Beast’s Maxwell Tani reports. Deputy editor Barry Petchesky was fired “for refusing to hew to the edict.” The company has also removed a post by Deadspin staff complaining about new auto-play, sound-on ads featured on the website. Writer Kelsey McKinney has posted a screenshot of the article to Twitter. “This isn’t what any of us signed up for,” one employee said of the new ads. “It’s amateurish and pushing longtime readers away and making the sites

Andrea Long Chu Elena Ferrante’s new novel, which will be released in Italy this November, has a US publication date. Europa Editions will publish The Lying Life of Adults in June 2020. The letters, manuscripts, and other papers of Abbie Hoffman have been bought by the University of Texas at Austin. The collection, which includes cards from John Lennon and Yoko Ono and FBI surveillance reports, among other items, will be kept at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History. At Literary Hub, Eric Newman talks to Andrea Long Chu about desire, political writing, and her new book, Females.

Patricia Highsmith Hatchette’s Twelve imprint has purchased a book from the anonymous Trump official who wrote the New York Times op-ed “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.” The author will remain anonymous. According to the writer’s agency, Javelin, the book, tentatively titled A Warning, was “written under extreme secrecy by someone in the room with the President and other senior administration officials on multiple occasions.” The book will be published next month, and became the No. 1 seller on Amazon within twenty-four hours of the announcement. Patricia Highsmith’s estate has made available hundreds of pages

Colson Whitehead. Photo: Chris Close The Kirkus Prize winners have been announced. Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys won the fiction award, and Saeed Jones’s How We Fight for Our Lives won the nonfiction award. Billie and Bryan Lourde, Carrie Fisher’s daughter and former partner, have released a statement against Sheila Weller’s upcoming unauthorized biography of the late actress, Carrie Fisher: A Life on the Edge. The family said that they didn’t know about the book until they read an excerpt in Los Angeles magazine. “The only books about Carrie Fisher worth reading are the ones Carrie wrote herself,” they

Miriam Toews. Photo: Carol Loewen At Fast Company, Ainsley Harris talks to Anand Giridharadas, the best-selling author of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, in which he argues that for too long, America’s billionaire class has been able to make “change without changing power.” Giridharadas leverages his significant Twitter following and television appearances to reach larger audiences, but maintains that “books are a place where you can tell the truth, where you can be a critic. There’s a space for unencumbered honesty.” At Longreads, Cameron Dezon Hammon, the author of This Is My Body: A

Ronan Farrow The French journalist and historian Georgette Elgey, who wrote an epic history of the Fourth Republic that took nearly fifty years to complete, has died at the age of ninety. In November, an anonymous Trump administration official wrote a New York Times op-ed, boldly declaring themselves part of the “resistance” within the administration and assuring readers that they, along with other staffers, were quietly working to “frustrate parts of [Trump’s] agenda and his worst inclinations.” Now, they are writing a book. A Warning will be published on November 19 by Hachette, with all the proceeds going to

Naomi Wolf The Swedish Academy is defending its choice to award Peter Handke the Nobel Prize in Literature. Handke, who Serbian-American novelist Aleksander Hemon has called “the Bob Dylan of genocide apologists,” has drawn widespread criticism for denying Serb atoricties and for attending the funeral of Slobodan Milošević. More than 39,00 people have signed a petition asking the Academy to revoke the prize. Rebecka Kärde, a member of the Nobel committee, wrote in the Sweidsh newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, “When we give the award to Handke, we argue that the task of literature is other than to confirm and reproduce

Nick Tosches Music writer Nick Tosches has died at age sixty-nine. The critic was associated with Lester Bangs and Richard Meltzer, who were dubbed the “noise boys.” Tosches got his start writing about rock ‘n’ roll for Creem, Rolling Stone, and other magazines, and went on to write books including Country (1977), Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story (1982), Unsung Heroes of Rock and Roll (1984), and the Dean Martin bio Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams (1992). HarperOne has purchased the world rights to Tiger Woods’s memoir, Back. Alexandra Alter offers a look at the

Jay Bernard. Photo: Joshua Virasami Former permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy Sara Danius has died at age 57, the New York Times reports. Danius “was the first woman to lead” the academy and “played a central role in the hotly debated decision” to award the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature to Bob Dylan. Danius resigned in 2018 after another academy member was accused of sexual assault by eighteen women. The TS Eliot Prize shortlist has been announced. Nominees include Jay Bernard’s Surge, Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic, and Sharon Olds’s Arias. The winner will be announced in January. Ismail

Margaret Atwood. Photo: Jean Malek The Guardian examines the controversy over the decision to award the 2019 Booker Prize to both Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo. Critics noted “that the first black woman ever to win Britain’s most prestigious literary award has had to share it – while receiving half the usual money.” In an op-ed, Booker judge Afua Hirsch defended the choice. “Choosing a winner for the Booker is a curious thing. You read, read and read. . . . Until one day, you have to somehow condense all of this to a single book,” she wrote. “We

Ben Lerner. Photo: John D. Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation At Literary Hub, Ocean Vuong talks to Ben Lerner about space, whiteness, and his new novel, The Topeka School. “Part of what makes writing worthwhile—for the writer and for the reader—is not just what artistry achieves but how it fails, how it is necessarily disfigured by history, which includes, which is dominated by, what Baldwin called the ‘lie’ of whiteness,” he said. “Certainly this is a book about whiteness, is more intensely focused than my others on how racist (and other forms of) violence fills the vacuum at the heart

Bernardine Evaristo. Photo: Jennie Scott Professor and literary critic Harold Bloom has died at age 89. Bloom had written over twenty books and was still teaching until last week. Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments and Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other have both won the 2019 Booker Prize. After five hours of deliberation, the judges chose to give the award to both authors, “despite being told repeatedly by the prize’s literary director, Gaby Wood, that they were not allowed to split the £50,000 award.” Evaristo is the first black woman and first black British author to win the prize. “These are

John Giorno in Andy Warhol’s “Sleep” Poet, artist, and activist John Giorno, author of Subduing Demons in America, died on Friday. Giorno, who collaborated with a number of writers including William S. Burroughs, was the “star” of Andy Warhol’s 1963 five-hour silent film Sleep. Giorno started the AIDS Treatment Project in 1984. In 1968, he started “Dial-a-Poem”: Anyone calling the number 641-793-8122 would hear a recording of poems by Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and others. The number still works today. “The most overrated books almost all emerged simultaneously from a single genre: magic realism. I can’t stand it. I

Sarah Ruhl. Photo: Zack DeZon G/O Media shut down news website Splinter yesterday. Although the company said there would be no layoffs as a result of the closure, Digiday reports that at least one employee has been let go and remaining employees “will be given opportunities to apply for open positions within G/O Media.” “Despite the hard work of everyone on that staff, which has produced much outstanding journalism and great scoops, establishing a steady and sustainable audience for a relatively young site proved challenging in a fiercely competitive sector,” a memo announcing the closure said. PEN America has

Olga Tokarczuk. Photo: Fryta 73 The winners of both the 2018 and 2019 Nobel Prizes in Literature have been announced. Olga Tokarczuk was chosen as the 2018 laureate for her “narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life,” while Peter Handke was selected as this year’s laureate for his “influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience.” The New York Times looks at both writers’ work and explains why last year’s prize was postponed. Ronan Farrow talks to the Hollywood Reporter about investigative

Marlon James. Photo: Jeffrey Skemp The finalists for the National Book Awards have been announced. Nominees include Marlon James’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf, Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House, Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police, and Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Thick. Winners will be announced in November. Alexandra Jacobs talks to Literary Hub about her experience writing her latest book, Still Here: The Madcap, Nervy, Singular Life of Elaine Stritch. “Unlike so many who quake at the blank page I feel confident beginning—less so wrapping things up,” she said. “That’s why biography is nice because you know how it’s going to

Crystal Hana Kim. Photo: Nina Subin The winners of this year’s Dayton Literary Peace Prize have been announced. Eli Saslow’s Rising Out of Hatred won the nonfiction prize, while Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde’s What We Owe won the prize for fiction. Rihanna is working on a “visual autobiography” with Phaidon, Entertainment Weekly reports. The five-hundred-page, eponymously titled Rihanna, which includes over one thousand photos of the singer’s life from childhood on, will be published later this month. Anna Merlan has joined Vice as senior staff writer for news features. Kevin Delaney, cofounder, CEO, and editor in chief of Quartz, is

Margaret Atwood Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, and others give tips on “how to write a Booker contender.” Last Thursday, a number of European publishers became concerned after reading that the Trump administration’s new tariffs on products from the European Union will be applied to books published in the UK and Germany. But as Ray Ambriano of Meadows Wye Co., a logistics company specializing in the publishing industry, has pointed out, according to the official language of the new tariffs, bound books will not be affected. Last night, Trump praised journalist and author Bob Woodward for his appearance on Face

Nona Willis Aronowitz Teen Vogue columnist Nona Willis Aronowitz has sold a new book to Plume. Bad Sex will be “a blend of memoir, social history, and culutural criticism” that examines why, “despite the ubiquity of both sex and feminism, true sexual freedom remains elusive.” Former National Enquirer editor Dylan Howard is threatening a lawsuit over Ronan Farrow’s upcoming book, Catch and Kill, the Daily Beast reports. Howard’s legal team is not only planning a lawsuit against Farrow and his publisher, Hachette, but “has taken the unusual step of also warning booksellers that plan to stock” the book. Abrams

Kristen Radtke. Photo: Amy Ritter The Whiting Foundation has announced the winners of its 2019 Creative Nonfiction Grant. Recipients include Ilyon Woo, Wil S. Hylton, and Kristen Radtke. Actor Jim Carrey is writing a novel with co-author Dana Vachon. Memoirs and Misinformation will be a “semi-autobiograhpical deconstruction of persona,” according to the press release. “None of this is real and all of it is true,” Carrey said of the book, which will be published by Knopf next May. Vice Media is one step closer to acquiring Refinery29, Variety reports. Though the deal has not been finalized, it is expected