Ocean Vuong. Photo: Tom Hines Ocean Vuong reflects on the myth of the wunderkind and lists ten of the books he turned to while writing On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. “The truth is no writer comes ‘out of nowhere,’” he writes, “and wunderkinds are only as real as our aversion to a more sobering—albeit less glamorous—reality: that a writer’s growth is often a slog, the slow burn of reading and trying and failing when, finally, by some luck or mercy, the book you’re reading turns into a torch in your hands.” Bustle Digital Group is launching a tech news

Téa Obreht. Photo: Ilan Harel A new report from PEN America lists the “arcane and arbitrary” titles that prisons are banning inmates from reading. In New York, “authorities tried to ban a book of maps of the moon, arguing that it could ‘present risks of escape,’” while Florida prisons “have prevented inmates from reading Klingon dictionaries and a colouring book about chickens,” and Texas prisons “have a banned list of more than 10,000 books by authors including Alice Walker, John Updike, George Orwell and Joyce Carol Oates.” Wall Street Journal reporters Maureen Farrell and Eliot Brown are working on

Greta Thunberg Greta Thunberg, the teen Swedish activist who was a driving force behind this month’s climate demonstrations, has signed a two-book deal with Penguin Press: No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference, a book of speeches, and Our House Is on Fire, a memoir. Cormac McCarthy has some ideas about “how to write a great science paper.” Among the tips Nature magazine gathered from the Blood Meridian novelist: “Use minimalism to achieve clarity. While you are writing, ask yourself: is it possible to preserve my original message without that punctuation mark, that word, that sentence, that

Lauren Wilkinson. Photo: Niqui Carter The Center for Fiction has announced the shortlist for the 2019 First Novel Prize. Nominees include De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s In West Mills, Chia-Chia Lin’s The Unpassing, Lauren Wilkinson’s American Spy, and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Playwright, novelist, publisher, and editor Sol Stein has died at the age of 92. Besides writing numerous books of his own, Stein worked closely with Lionel Trilling, Dylan Thomas, James Baldwin, and many others. David Mitchell is writing a new novel. Utopia Avenue tells the story of a band of the same name, “of riots in

Sarah M. Broom. Photo: Adam Shemper Otherppl’s Brad Listi talks to Sarah M. Broom about home, structure, and her new memoir, The Yellow House. “I was thinking about the book as a sort of house, that needs a specific architecture. When you go to someone’s house, you don’t just bust in and end up in someone’s bedroom, right? There is a pathway you follow,” she explained. “How do you set up thresholds in a book? How does the reader feel when they’re moving through it? What’s the familial space and the public space? It came to me at the

Ocean Vuong. Photo: Tom Hines The MacArthur Foundation announced the winners of the 2019 “genius” grants. Fellows include writers Ocean Vuong and Saidiya Hartman. Vox Media has bought New York Media. “No one had to do this,” New York Media CEO Pamela Wasserstein told the New York Times. “It’s a brilliant, in our view, opportunity, so that’s why we leaned into it. It’s not out of need. It’s out of ambition.” Director Guillermo del Toro is writing a book of short stories for Amazon’s Original Stories publishing imprint. The still-untitled book “will introduce a world of strange happenings, otherwordly

Anelise Chen Anelise Chen’s So Many Olympic Exertions, Isabella Hammad’s The Parisian, Johannes Lichtman’s Such Good Work, Bryan Washington’s Lot, and Ashley Wurzbacher’s Happy Like This have been selected as “5 Under 35” honorees by the National Book Foundation. Oprah Winfrey has picked Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer for her eponymous book club, which is being revived by Apple Books. The New York Times’s Alexandra Alter looks at the ways book publishers are taking more responsibility for the accuracy of the books they publish. “Publishers have long maintained that fact-checking every book would be prohibitively expensive, and that the

Camonghne Felix Camonghne Felix, whose poetry collection Build Yourself a Boat is on the long list for the National Book Award, is also the Director of Surrogates Strategic Communications of Elizabeth Warren’s campaign for president. We’re watching the Emmys, and wondering: Why are the people accepting awards for the HBO miniseries Chernobyl refusing to thank (or even mention) Svetlana Alexievich, the Nobel-prize-winning author of Voices from Chernobyl? Even though Alexievich initially refused to work with the production, she later said she was “impressed” with the miniseries, calling it “a very strong film.” And director-producer Craig Mazin has admitted, on

Leslie Jamison. Photo: Beowulf Sheehan The National Book Foundation has announced the nominees for the 2019 nonfiction prize, including Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House, Hanif Abdurraqib’s Go Ahead in the Rain, and Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Thick. A German award jury has reversed its decision to give the Nelly Sachs Prize to British author Kamila Shamsie over her support of the BDS movement against the Israeli government. In the New York Times Magazine, Kat Chow profiles Red in the Bone author Jacqueline Woodson. Leslie Jamison talks to Entertainment Weekly about revision, earnestness, and her new essay collection, Make It

Kimberly King Parsons. Photo: Heather Hawksford Otherppl’s Brad Listi talks to Kimberly King Parsons about empathy, Texas, and her new story collection, Black Light. “I wasn’t planning for this to be a collection. I was just learning how to write,” she said. “I had this big project that ended up being a big disaster, but I was writing these stories that were the things that made me really excited. I just thought that this was to practice or to hone craft; I wasn’t thinking of them as a collection but standalone pieces. What started to happen was that my

Naja Marie Aidt. Photo: Mikkel Tjellesen Finalists for the 2019 Kirkus Prize have been announced. Nominees include Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Colson Whitehead’s The NIckel Boys, Hanif Abdurraqib’s Go Ahead in the Rain, and Naja Marie Aidt’s When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back: Carl’s Book. Winners will be announced in a ceremony this October. Naja Marie Aidt’s book is also on the longlist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature, along with Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police, Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, and more. This year’s

Margaret Atwood. Photo: Jean Malek Comedian Chris Rock is writing a book. The essay collection, My First Black Boyfriend, will be published in 2020 by Celadon. The Booker prize committee is denying that it has already selected Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments as its 2019 winner “after a bookseller mistakenly displayed copies declaring it the 2019 victor,” The Guardian reports. The Guardian collects advice from writers on how to deal with social media. At Longreads, Samuel Ashworth looks at the phenomenon of congressional fan fiction. “If you’ve always associated fan fiction with the kind of people who hand-sew their own

Edward Snowden’s memoir, Permanent Record, will go on sale on Tuesday. Metropolitan Books has—no surprise—kept the contents of the book very secret, but two critics have managed to get their hands on advance copies. Jennifer Szalai reviews the memoir for the Times (she calls it “a riveting account and a curious artifact”), and Christian Lorentzen reviews it for the London Review of Books. Both writers note that in the book’s acknowledgments, Snowden thanks novelist-critic Joshua Cohen “for taking me to writing school.” They also note that Cohen’s 2015 novel Book of Numbers features a character named Joshua Cohen who

Taffy Brodesser-Akner. Photo: Erik Tanner Ian McEwan is publishing a new satirical novel about Brexit later this month. In The Cockroach, “Jim Sams wakes and finds he must endure a worse fate” than Kafka’s Gregor Samsa: Instead of a beetle, Sams “has become the British prime minister.” “As the nation tears itself apart, constitutional norms are set aside, parliament is closed down so that the government cannot be challenged at a crucial time and ministers lie about it shamelessly in the old Soviet style, and when many Brexiters in high places seem to crave the economic catastrophe of a

Laura van den Berg Faber Faber is publishing an anthology of late journalist Lyra McKee’s work. McKee has already signed a contract with the publisher when she was murdered by New IRA gunmen last April. Lyra McKee: Lost, Found, Remembered will be published in April 2020. Journalist Rainesford Stauffer has sold a book to Harper Perennial. An Ordinary Age will be “a narrative investigation into the challenges of emerging adulthood in contemporary America.” At Entertainment Weekly, Laura van den Berg reveals the cover of her upcoming short story collection and reflects on the importance of the form. “Falling in

Jhumpa Lahiri. Photo: Lynn Neary Ruth Reichl remembers her editor Susan Kamil, who died earlier this week at the age of sixty-nine. “Susan’s ability to read my mind astonished me; our editing sessions often felt like a visit to a psychiatrist,” she writes. “Memoir or novel, it was exactly the same. Even fictional characters were so real to Susan that she wanted to know what they were feeling, doing, wearing, even when they stepped off the page.” “Language is the substance of literature, but language also locks it up again, confining it to silence and obscurity,” says Jhumpa Lahiri

Attica Locke. Photo: Jenny Walters Europa Editions has released an excerpt from the beginning of a new Elena Ferrante novel. The still-untitled book, which will be released in Italy in November, does not yet have a US release date and will be translated by Ann Goldstein. Attica Locke talks to The Guardian about forgiveness, home, and her new book, Heaven, My Home. “I live in LA now, but Texas is my home in a way that will never be displaced in my heart and soul. It’s the lens through which I see the world,” she said. “I don’t mean

Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement will be published on Tuesday. According to the New York Times, the paper where the two authors broke the Weinstein story, the book will name many previously unnamed key sources, as well as those who tried to stymie the Weinstein investigation. Among those who helped to bring Weinstein down: his own accountant. Alexandra Alter writes: “Drawing on new reporting and previously undisclosed corporate records, emails and text messages, She Said uncovers more on the extent of Mr.

Margaret Atwood. Photo: Jean Malek Former press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders is writing a book, the New York Times reports. “I’m excited to tell my story about the challenges of being a working mom at the highest level of American politics and my role in the historic fight raging between the Trump administration and its critics for the future of our country,” Sanders said in a press release. The book will be published next fall by St. Martin’s Press. Biographer and editor James Atlas has died at the age of seventy. Time magazine has named Susanna Schrobsdorff as both

Jade Sharma. Photo: Tracie Williams At Catapult, Ruth Curry and Micaela Durand remember author Jade Sharma, who died in July at age thirty-nine. “Jade was late for everything so it is a tiny surprise that dying is the one thing she came to early. That is the kind of joke she’d enjoy,” remembers Curry. “She was uniquely talented, and it breaks my heart that I will never read anything new from her again.” “The world is less dark without you in it and I don’t mean better,” writes Durand. “I hope wherever you are you’re not bored.” At Columbia