David Haskell. Photo: Marvin Orellana The National Book Critics Circle has announced its 2018 awards. Among the winners are Anna Burns (fiction) for Milkman, Steve Coll (nonfiction) for Directorate S, Zadie Smith (criticism) for Feel Free, and Ada Limon (poetry) for The Carrying. Maureen Corrigan of NPR’s Fresh Air took home the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, and Arte Público Press, the largest publisher of Hispanic literature in the US, was presented with the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award. At the Columbia Journalism Review, a podcast featuring Adam Moss, the soon-to-be-former editor of New York magazine, in

Olga Tokarczuk The longlist for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize has been announced. Nominees include Annie Ernaux’s The Years, Can Xue’s Love in the New Millennium, Samanta Schweblin’s Mouthful of Birds, and Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. The shortlist will be announced in April, and the winner revealed in May. Alicia Keys is writing a memoir. More Myself will be published by Oprah Winfrey’s Flatiron Books imprint, An Oprah Book, in November. The winners of this year’s Windham-Campbell Prizes have been announced. Honorees include Rebecca Solnit, Danielle McLaughlin, and Kwame Dawes. Lit

Namwali Serpell. Photo: Peg Korpinski At Popula, Mik Awake reflects on the inherent disappointment of “owning many books.” After finally purchasing his own copy of The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, a book that he had checked out from his high school library over and over, Awake writes that he instantly felt he had made a mistake. “Owning it could not recapture the electricity of that reading experience, nor deepen my personal claim,” he writes. “Instead of my past, these books only conjure visions of the inevitable future, of the day when I will be dead, and someone else

Joni Mitchell The Guardian reports that in the last two years, political book sales have doubled. Although “many of last year’s strong sellers dealt with Donald Trump . . . readers were also seeking more classic fare” like Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto and George Orwell’s Notes on Nationalism.

Margo Jefferson Elton John, who is currently on what he says will be his final tour, has announced that he has finished his autobiography, which will be published on October 15. According to John, “My life has been one helluva roller coaster ride and I’m now ready to tell you my story, in my own words.” Henry Holt, the musician’s publisher, is calling the book “no holds barred.” At The Cut, Anna Sillman interviews the Pulitzer-winning critic Margo Jefferson, who in 2006 released the critical study On Michael Jackson. Now that she’s seen the HBO documentary Leaving Neverland, she

Akwaeke Emezi. Photo: Elizabeth Wirija Lambda Literary has announced the finalists for this year’s Lammy awards. Nominees include Sarah Schulman’s Maggie Terry, Édouard Louis’s History of Violence, and Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater. Winners will be announced at a ceremony in June. The Paris Review has announced the winners of this year’s Plimpton and Terry Southern Prizes. Kelli Jo Ford has won the Plimpton Prize for her story “Hybrid Vigor,” and Benjamin Nugent has won the Terry Southern Prize for his story “Safe Spaces.” The awards will be presented at the magazine’s Spring Revel in April. The 2019 Bancroft prize has

Jessica Hopper. Photo: David Sampson Slate has chosen longtime New York magazine editor Jared Hohlt as the website’s new editor in chief. Hohlt had previously worked at Slate as an editorial assistant at the beginning of his career. “It was a journalistic training ground for me,” he told the New York Times. “I’ve been living on a biweekly rhythm for a long time now and I’m excited for a whole new rhythm to work with.” Jessica Hopper has sold a new book to Farrar, Straus and Giroux. No God But Herself: How Women Changed Music in 1975 will be

Richard Powers There will be two Nobel Prizes in Literature awarded this October, the New York Times reports. Last year’s prize was cancelled due to “a scandal involving sexual abuse, accusations of financial wrongdoing and hints of a cover-up” within the Swedish Academy. The finalists for this year’s PEN/Faulkner Award have been announced. Nominees include Richard Powers’s The Oberstory, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s Call Me Zebra, and Blanche McCrary Boyd’s Tomb of the Unknown Racist. The winner will be announced in April. Blockchain journalism start-up Civil is relaunching its token sale today. Poynter’s Rick Edmonds explains how the

Akwaeke Emezi. Photo: Elizabeth Wirija The longlist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction has been announced. Nominees include Anna Burns’s Milkman, Tayari Jones’s An American Marriage, Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive, and Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater. A federal judge ruled last week that Stephen Elliott cannot sue Shitty Media Men list creator Moira Donegan for emotional distress, but that he can continue with his defamation suit. Former British Vogue editor Emily Sheffield is developing “a news startup based around Instagram stories.” The project, #ThisMuchIKnow, is funded by The Guardian’s venture capital fund, BuzzFeed News reports. Elle profiles New Yorker writer

Rowan Ricardo Phillips Rowan Ricardo Phillips, a poet and the author of The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey, has won the 2019 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing. Philip Roth’s Upper West Side apartment just went on the market for $3.2 million. At the New Republic, Josephine Livingstone writes about James Lasdun’s new novel Afternoon of a Faun, and wonders: “Can a man write a great #MeToo novel?” Electric Lit has interviewed George Saunders about his experiences of contributing to the New Yorker. At first, he says, he didn’t know what he was doing: “They sent me a really nice

Layli Long Sponsorship of the Booker Prize has been taken over by Crankstart, a charitable foundation run by Michael Moritz and Harriet Heyman. The Man group, an investment firm that had funded the prize for the past eighteen years, will cease its involvement with the literary award in June. Crankstart has a five-year exclusive contract that can be renewed for a further five years.  New York magazine’s The Cut has started publishing literary fiction on the site. A new story will appear on The Cut every month. New York has been expanding literary content across its sister platforms—in September,

Edouard Louis Literary Hub reports on Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a former detainee at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and author of the bestselling book Guantanamo Diary. After being held for fourteen years without being charged with a crime, Slahi was released to his home country, Mauritania, in 2016, but is now unable to get a passport. Slahi says of his circumstances: “This is hard to understand because it’s so weird. . . . I need my freedom. I need it now.” Philip Roth’s Upper West Side apartment is up for sale. The asking price is $3.2 million. Gary Cohn,

Geoff Dyer The Seattle Weekly will cease its print publication after forty-two years, becoming online-only after the last edition hits newsstands today. The closing comes sixteen months after the Weekly laid off most of the staff in an effort to become profitable again. Josh O’Connor, the president of the publication’s parent company, Sound Publishing, explained the decision in a letter to readers: “Under Sound Publishing, Seattle Weekly tried to continue an emphasis on features and lifestyle topics that would appeal to younger readers, but this, unfortunately, came right at a time when ‘younger’ readers were abandoning print.” Without the

Helen Oyeyemi. Photo: Tom Pilston The New York Review of Books has chosen two new editors to replace Ian Buruma, who left the magazine five months ago. NYRB senior editor Gabriel Winslow-Yost will co-edit the publication with current New Yorker managing editor Emily Greenhouse. Regular contributor Daniel Mendelsohn will take on the new role of editor at large. PEN America has created a new award for performance writing. Playwright Kenneth Lonergan will be the first recipient of the PEN/Mike Nichols Writing for Performance Award. The Washington Post has created a new fellowship in honor of Jamal Khashoggi. The program

Natasha Wimmer Last night, James Baldwin became the top trending search on Google worldwide, up 3,400 percent, after Regina King won best supporting actress for her role in If Beale Street Could Talk, which was based on Baldwin’s novel of the same name. W.E.B. Griffin, the author of dozens of bestselling spy and war novels, has died at eighty-nine. According to Griffin, he wrote more than 150 books, but as the New York Times points out: “Determining the exact number of books he wrote is not so easily done. . . . He was a ghostwriter for many, and

In anticipation of this weekend’s Oscars ceremony, LitHub The Los Angeles Times reports from a literary event this week featuring Roxane Gay and Marlon James. The two authors discussed James’s new fantasy novel, Black Leopard, Red Wolf, a book that’s often been compared to R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones series. But James thinks Martin fans might not be totally on board: “They’re going to be so disappointed . . . except for the sex and violence.” Elizabeth McCracken talks to The Millions about living abroad, community, and her new novel, Bowlaway. On Monday at Books are Magic in Brooklyn,

Amanda Petrusich New Yorker music critic Amanda Petrusich talks to The Rumpus about critical authority, Twitter mobs, and snobbery. “My growth as a writer was unlearning that snobbishness and trying to cultivate more of a rawness in my relationship with the people who were reading me, if I was lucky enough to have anyone reading me,” she said of the evolution of music criticism. “I think it made me as a writer feel less alone, it made me feel like I was in conversation with a lot of other people in a way that I found really comforting and

Lindsay Stern. Photo: Lee Stern New York Times Magazine staff writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner has sold a new book. “A family story of wealth and class and inheritance and dubious paternity,” Long Island Compromise was bought by Random House and does not yet have a publication date. “Gizmodo’s track record of skewering owners is scaring away bidders,” the New York Post reports. Sources say that Univision “could attract more buyers if it would rein in an editorial independence provision in Gizmodo’s union contract.” As one anonymous digital media CEO explained, “I specifically think about the post their special projects desk

Lauren Elkin. Photo: Marianne Katser Sarah Hughes looks at the ways that #MeToo is showing up in fiction. “Many critics can only process fantasy as a commentary on the now,” Marlon James tells The Guardian. “Do you review Wolf Hall looking for modern-day parallels? Well if you do, then that’s on you. There are other things to be said about humanity than the contemporary experience.” At the New York Times Book Review, Gal Beckerman advocates for “the value of invisibility and silence” in our busy, noisy world through two new books: Akiko Busch’s How to Disappear and Jane Brox’s

Naomi Klein has sold her new book, On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal, to Simon and Schuster for a “rumored high six-figure sum.” According to the publisher, Klein’s new study concerns the “urgency of the climate crisis, as well as the fiery energy of a rising political movement demanding a transformational Green New Deal.” The new Center for Fiction, long housed at the Mercantile Library in Manhattan, is moving to Brooklyn. According to Noreen Tomassi, the Center’s executive director, the new space will not only support writers and literary events but also foster a literary