Darcey Steinke The New York Times pays homage to Tin House, the innovative literary journal run by Elissa Schappell and Rob Spillman that, after twenty years, will publish its final, 400-page issue this month. In an eloquent and rangy interview, the novelist Lynne Tillman, author most recently of Men and Apparitions, talks about how she finds the voice of her characters, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, photography, feminism, backlash, and much more. Barnes and Noble has been purchased by the hedge fund Elliott Advisors, which purchased the British bookseller Waterstones last year, for $638 million. Waterstones chief executive, James Daunt, is

Négar Djavadi. Photo: Philippe Matsas Négar Djavadi’s novel Disoriental has won the 2019 Albertine Prize. “By exploring the nuances between the intersection of eastern and western cultures in Disoriental, Négar Djavadi sheds light on one of the many facets of French culture” said cultural counselor of the French Embassy Benedicte de Montlaur. “Now in its third year, the prize received more votes than any other year, a testament to the growing appreciation and need for international literature in the United States.” “The anonymous Californian woman who was sexually assaulted by Stanford University student Brock Turner and whose powerful victim’s

Tayari Jones. Photo: Nina Subin Tayari Jones’s An American Marriage has won this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction. “The shortlist was so strong and I was honoured to be among them but I had no idea whether I would win,” Jones said in her acceptance. “I didn’t write a speech!” Mitchell S. Jackson talks to Edie Meidav about becoming a writer, secrets, and his new book, Survival Math. At Longreads, Tobias Carroll talks to Kristen Arnett about family, taxidermy, and her new book, Mostly Dead Things. “I like thinking about the ways that we hurt each other, and sometimes

Elif Batuman. Photo: Beowulf Sheehan The winners of this year’s Lambda Literary Awards have been announced. Honorees include Trustee Award winner Alexander Chee and Visionary Award winner Masha Gessen. Filmmaker Sandi Tan is working on a screen adaptation of Elif Batuman’s The Idiot. “The book’s basically the intelligent, creative young woman’s Twilight,” she told The Cut’s Anna Silman. “It’s about this woman who is head smart and heart stupid — that’s why she’s the idiot. . . . And she’s being sucked into this vortex of obsession by this guy, and by the end of it she gets destroyed.

Namwali Serpell. Photo: Peg Korpinski This year’s PEN Pinter prize has been awarded to playwright and poet Lemn Sissay. “I met Harold Pinter when I was 36. We were on stage at the Royal Court,” Sissay said in the announcement. “I was too intimidated or self-conscious to speak to him. And so I will now. ‘Thank you.’” Sissay will receive the prize at a ceremony in October. In a Twitter thread, the BuzzFeed News Union says that the company is dragging its feet on recognizing the union. “BuzzFeed’s management is proposing a bargaining unit that unfairly disenfranchises many of

Elif Shafak Last weekend in Queens, the group Slightly Altered States put together a marathon, 24-hour reading of The Mueller Report. Filibustered and Unfiltered started on Saturday at 8pm in Long Island City and included more than 100 paricipants, including the performer Taylor Mac. Clay Smith is leaving his post as editor-in-chief of the Kirkus book review to work full-time on the San Antonio Book Festival. Tom Beer, who was formerly the books editor at Bloomberg News and is currently the books editor at Newsday, has been named the new editor-in-chief at Kirkus, and will start on June 17.

Nicole Dennis-Benn. Photo: Jason Berger Anna North is working on a Western. Outlawed, “a feminist Western following a young midwife through her initiation into the notorious Hole in the Wall Gang and their dangerous mission to transform the Wild West,” will be published by Bloomsbury in 2021. Hulu has ordered a series based on Sally Rooney’s Normal People. The twelve-episode series will be written by Rooney along with Alice Birch and Mark O’Rowe, and will be directed by Lenny Abrahamson and Hettie MacDonald. Filming begins next week, and the series will air next year. Vox’s Dara Lind is joining

Ibram X. Kendi At the New York Times, Ibram X. Kendi explains what it means to be antiracist and offers a reading list to assist with that workl. “To build a nation of equal opportunity for everyone, we need to dismantle this spurious legacy of our common upbringing. One of the best ways to do this is by reading books,” he writes. “Not books that reinforce old ideas about who we think we are, what we think America is, what we think racism is. Instead, we need to read books that are difficult or unorthodox, that don’t go down

Tony Horwitz Tony Horwitz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and book author who immersed himself deeply in his subjects (slaughterhouses, the sea travels of explorer Captain James Cook, the culture of Civil War reenactments), died yesterday in Washington, DC. In a review of Horwitz’s new book, Spying on the South, Tom Carson writes of Horwitz’s work: “Not many writers mix up geniality and astuteness as enjoyably as Tony Horwitz does. He’s got a rare knack for spotting topics whose eccentricity lets him juxtapose the baleful past and the cuckoo present in arresting, provocative, hugely entertaining ways.” Siege: Trump Under Fire,

Binyavanga Wainaina The Kenyan author and gay rights activist Binyavanga Wainaina has died. Wainaina is the author of Someday I Will Write about This Place, and made international news in 2014 when he responded to a wave of anti-gay laws in African countries by publicly outing himself in a short essay. On Thursday last week, Naomi Wolf went on BBC Radio to discuss her book Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love, which is due to be published on June 18. The book’s premise hinges on a nineteenth-century English legal term, “death recorded.” Wolf took the term to

Ryan Chapman. Photo: Beowulf Sheehan The Guardian is launching an investigative series called “Toxic America,” Digiday reports. Through the series, which will “explore the public health implications of all the chemicals that have crept into American food, air and water,” the paper hopes to increase American readership and donations. Esquire editor in chief Jay Fielden is leaving the magazine. “I think that’s one of the great things about fiction and the first-person voice is that, unlike a film or a painting or music, people will go with you to incredibly transgressive and dark paces and laugh at things that

Paul Butler The American Civil Liberties Union and Paul Butler are challenging Arizona’s decision to ban Butler’s book, Chokehold: Policing Black Men from the state’s prison system. The group plans to file a lawsuit if the decision is not reversed. “There’s nothing about ‘Chokehold’ that threatens day-to-day safety of inmates or jailers,” Butler told the New York Times. “‘Chokehold’ is all about threatening the institution of prison. . . . I found the ban somewhat ironic . . . because it’s kind of supporting the thesis.” The final book of Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy will be published next

Jokha Alharthi Former National Security Advisor and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice is writing a memoir. Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For, which covers everything from Rice’s childhood to “national security challenges,” will be published by Simon Schuster in October. The 2019 Man Booker International Prize has been awarded to Jokha Alharthi’s novel Celestial Bodies, which was translated by Marilyn Booth. Literary Hub’s Emily Temple rounds up writing advice from Nora Ephron. In an excerpt from her new book The Dark Fantastic, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas reflects on reading fantasy and speculative fiction as a person of

Raymond Antrobus. Photo: Adam Docker Raymond Antrobus has won the Rathbones Folio Prize for his poetry collection, The Perseverance. Antrobus is the first poet to win the prize. Digiday looks at the sale of Salon Media Group to Proper Media owners Chris Richmond and Drew Schoentrup. The pair “see an easy path toward profits” that doesn’t require cutting editorial staff. Now that HBO’s Game of Thrones has ended, Literary Hub and The Guardian both offer lists of fantasy series “to fill the dragon-shaped hole in your life.” On Will Schwalbe’s But That’s Another Story podcast, Lisa Lucas discusses Robert

Jeanette Winterson Herman Wouk, the author of numerous bestsellers, including the World War II epic War and Remembrance, has died at the age fo 103. Jeanette Winterson talks about Frankissstein, which revisits the industrial revolution of Mary Shelley classic’s classic and pulls us back into the present of “artificial intelligence, sexbots, and cryogenics.” The technology of the future “could be lovely,” Winterson says. “But it’s not going to be, because we are human so we will fuck it up!” At LitHub, Alexis Gunderson writes about a “new generation of villainous women” in fiction. “Just as #MeToo and Time’s Up

Weike Wang. Photo: Saavedra Photography At Literary Hub, Michele Filgate talks to Inheritance author Dani Shapiro about structure, trauma, and memoir writing. “I don’t think you can write prose from the place of trauma. I think poets can do that, I think that’s what poets do,” she said. “If you think about any moment in your life that has been traumatic, for any of us, what do we do, we tell the story again and again and we tell it the same way because we are trying to digest it, we are trying to make sense of it, we

Jessica Valenti Fire and Fury author Michael Wolff is writing a new book about the Trump administration. Siege: Trump Under Fire will be published by Henry Holt on June 4 and focuses “on tensions amid the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into alleged ties between Russian officials and the Trump presidential campaign.” Salon Media Group is hoping to sell the website for $5 million, the New York Post reports. However, the company noted that “there can be no guarantee that the asset sale will be completed and, if not completed, we may have to file for bankruptcy and liquidation.” 

Tayari Jones. Photo: Nina Subin. George RR Martin denied rumors that “he has secretly finished the final two books” of his series. After Game of Thrones actor Ian McElhinney told an EPIC Con audience that the sixth and seventh books had already been written, Martin responded, “Why would I sit for years on completed novels? . . . They make millions and millions of dollars every time a new Ice Fire book comes out, as do I. Delaying makes no sense.” An American Marriage author Tayari Jones’s 2011 novel, Silver Sparrow, has been optioned by Issa Rae. In honor

Chelsea Manning. Photo: Tim Travers Hawkins Chelsea Manning has signed a book deal with Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The New York Times talks to Manning about the memoir, which will be published in early 2020. “It’s a personal narrative of what was going on in my life surrounding that time and what led to the leaks, what led to prison, and how this whole ordeal has really shaped me and changed me,” she said. “This is more about trying to contextualize my story from my perspective rather than get into the weeds of what is in the record of

Eileen Myles The Paris Review interviews Eileen Myles: “If I had been a good student and an achiever, I might have been excited by a more systematic approach to writing than what I do. People loved to throw around the word rigorous in the eighties. I’d go bleh. When I started to pull something out of the pool of incoherence, it was exciting in itself.” At The Guardian, Richard Powers talks about how he researched his book The Overstory, which was just awarded the Pulitzer Prize. “I read more than 120 single-volume books about trees, but unlike many of