Janet Malcolm. Photo: Nina Subin The Swedish ambassador to China is under investigation after “she was accused of arranging unauthorized, secret talks” between imprisoned publisher Gui Minhai’s daughter and “two Chinese men who had offered to help free him, but instead pressured her to keep silent,” the New York Times reports. “At the very least, town halls could be saved for candidates who are actually running,” writes Columbia Journalism Review’s Jon Allsop on CNN’s recent town-hall interview with Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz. “Whenever he was asked a tough, personal question last night, Schultz looked at Harlow with a furrowed

Naomi Alderman. Photo: Justine Stoddard Just in time for Valentine’s Day, the New York Times offers a list of “books for broken hearts,” including Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, and Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation. Verso is launching a fiction imprint. Verso Fiction will publish two to four works a year, with a focus on translated fiction, starting later this year. Amazon is adapting Naomi Alderman’s The Power into a streaming series. Columbine author Dave Cullen talks to Columbia Journalism Review about reporting on school shootings, gun control, and his new

Valeria Luiselli Katie Couric is working on a memoir. In Unexpected, USA Today reports that “Couric plans to share details both ‘hilarious’ and ‘humiliating’ as she looks back on her prize-winning, 40-year career.” The book will be published by Little, Brown in 2021. At Longreads, Lily Meyer talks to Valeria Luiselli about observation, how being bilingual affects her writing, and her new book, Lost Children Archive. “One language always has a word that’s more accurate. There are words that are exactly right, but the exact word doesn’t exist in the other language,” she said. “It forces you to sit

Haruki Murakami Haruki Murakami talks to the New Yorker’s Deborah Treisman about cats, alternate worlds, and how he became a writer. Murakami says that inspiration struck at a Yakult Swallows baseball game in Tokyo. “The first batter hit a double, and at that moment I got a feeling I could write. Maybe I’d drunk too much beer,” he explained. “Before that I hadn’t written anything at all. I was the owner of a jazz club, and I was so busy making cocktails and sandwiches. I make very good sandwiches! But after that game I went to the stationery store

Malcolm Gladwell Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of the New York Times, is continuing to do damage control following allegations that parts of her new book, Merchants of Truth, are plagiarized. “All of the allegations that I lifted material or plagiarized—that’s not true, but I did make mistakes in the footnotes, and there are some uncited passages,” Abramson told Vox’s Sean Illing. “Those sources are credited in other footnotes; it’s just those specific quotes are not, and that’s an error and it will be fixed pronto.” When Illing pointed out that at least one article—a Jake Malooley piece

Jill Abramson. Photo: Peter Yang Dan Mallory, the pseudonymous author of The Woman in the Window who was recently exposed by the New Yorker for lying about his health and past, will publish a second novel with HarperCollins UK, The Guardian reports. “Professionally, Dan was a highly valued editor and the publication of The Woman in the Window – a Sunday Times bestseller – speaks for itself,” the publisher said in a statement. Reporter Jim DeRogatis, who has spent decades investigating the accusations against R. Kelly, is working on a book about the allegations against singer. Soulless: The Case

Reniqua Allen. Photo: Nina Subin Craigslist founder Craig Newmark is donating $10 million to the Columbia Journalism School to endow the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security. Alice Marie Johnson, who was serving a life sentence for drug trafficking until Kim Kardashian convinced Donald Trump to commute her sentence, is writing a memoir. After Life: My Journey From Incarceration to Freedom, which includes a foreword by Kardashian, will be published by HarperCollins in May. R.O. Kwon and Esmé Weijun Wang discuss ambition, writer’s block, and karaoke. At Longreads, Danielle Jackson talks to Reniqua Allen about burnout, millennials,

Ottessa Moshfegh The 2019 Wellcome Prize longlist has been announced. Nominees include Thomas Page McBee’s Amateur, Tara Westover’s Educated, and Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation. The winner announced in May. PEN America has announced the winners of this year’s nomination-based literary awards. Honorees, including Sandra Cisneros and Larissa Fasthorse among others, will receive their prizes at a ceremony later this month. Netflix has ordered a series based on Karin Slaughter’s 2018 crime novel, Pieces of Her. At LitHub, Bowlaway author Elizabeth McCracken considers the doughnut. “Like most works of art, doughnuts are defined by an absence,”

Morgan Parker. Photo: Rachel Eliza Griffiths In an essay at LitHub, Marlon James explores why he has written extensively about his father, but never about his mother. “She was the one always there, and yet the one harder to write about. It’s easy to spin a clever fiction about my father. Not so easy to string words about my mom, the person who applied bandages and bought schoolbooks, but also the adult often around during long stretches of holiday boredom. Even on a purely linguistic level, ‘the man who wasn’t there’ sounds sexier than ‘the woman who was always

Marianne Williamson Bestselling author Marianne Williamson, who ran for congress in California in 2014, has announced that she is running for president as a Democrat in the 2020 elections. Williamson is the author of A Return to Love, in which she reflects on the spiritual guidebook A Course in Miracles, and many other books, and has also become well known as a public speaker. Williamson is calling for a “moral and spiritual awakening in the US,” and has vowed to fight the “amoral economic system” and the “layers of systemic racism” in the US. She also believes in universal

Jenny Xie. Photo: Teresa Mathew

Maurice Carlos Ruffin At the Paris Review, Peyton Burgess talks to Maurice Carlos Ruffin about survivalists, white supremacy, and his new book, We Cast a Shadow. “The thing is, I believe that America is the greatest country on earth, yet we always have multiple layers of injustice that are operating at any given time,” Ruffin said. “When I was writing this book in 2012, President Obama was constantly shipping immigrants out of the country. Now it’s to the point of taking kids from their parents—and for half of America that’s still no big deal.” LitHub’s Gabrielle Bellot reflects on

Gillian Flynn Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn is working on a streaming series for Amazon, Vulture reports. An adaptation of a British series, Utopia tells the story of a group of people who “end up in the crosshairs of an ominous deep-state organization,” Vulture’s Jordan Crucchiola explains. “As you might expect, it will be up to them to save the world.” Bart van Es’s The Cut Out Girl has won the 2018 Costa book of the year award.  Dani Shapiro talks to The Millions about journalism, writing through trauma, and her new book, Inheritance. At The Baffler, Becca Rothfeld

Kiese Laymon The Guardian talks toThe Hate U Give author Angie Thomas about diversity in YA literature, rejection, and her new book, On the Come Up. “Rejection is always hard . . . but what helped me was the community of unpublished authors out there on the internet, so you can connect and you can weep and mourn together. And I always had to remind myself that it only takes one yes to change everything,” she said. “I know writers who had 500 rejections, and more than that – but you just have to keep going and hope that

In an essay that reflects on the recent rediscovery and celebration of works by Lucia Berlin, Kathleen Collins, and Eve Babitz, Parul Sehgal writes about the critic’s responsibility when writing about works of literature by women that have been lost. “It’s not enough to give thanks that these writers have been restored to us; we need to ask why they vanished in the first place.” Penguin Random House is shutting down its imprint Spiegel Grau. The news has come as a surprise to many in the industry, in part because Spiegel Grau has published a number of groundbreaking books

Nafissa Thompson-Spires The 2019 PEN America Literary Award finalists have been announced. Nominees include Helen DeWitt’s Some Trick, Ling Ma’s Severance, Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s Heads of the Colored People, and Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, among many others. Winners will be announced in February. Jim Acosta, the chief White House correspondent for CNN, is writing a book about Trump and his administration’s hostility toward the media. The Enemy of the People: A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth in America will tell “never-before-revealed stories of this White House’s rejection of truth, while laying out the stakes for

John Ashbery Harvard’s Houghton Library has acquired John Ashbery’s personal library of over 5,000 books. Curator Christina Davis called the collection, which includes everything from religious history to cookbooks, “a vital artery in his writing life” that “served as a kind of early and intimate internet, from which he drew ideas and felicitous bits of data on a regular basis.” Following the success of Wired, the New Yorker, and Vanity Fair’s respective paywalls, Condé Nast is planning to add metered paywalls to all its publications by the end of 2019, the Wall Street Journal reports. Bill Clinton is working

Rachel Kushner The National Book Critics Circle has announced the finalists for the 2018 awards. Nominees include Tara Westover’s Educated, Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room, Zadie Smith’s Feel Free, and more. The winners will be announced at a ceremony in March. New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast’s memoir Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? is being adapted for television. At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Hayley Phelan |https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/shirley-jackson-trump-and-the-evil-of-complacency/#!|reflects| on “Shirley Jackson, Trump, and the evil of complacency.” Former Radar editor Maer Roshan has been hired as editor in chief at Los Angeles magazine. “I have the same excitement

Chigozie Obioma. Photo: Zach Mueller Emma Brockes |https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jan/18/chigozie-obioma-why-do-my-stories-end-this-way-honestly-i-want-to-write-a-feelgood-story-|talks to| Chigozie Obioma about migration, fate, and his new book, An Orchestra of Minorities. Obioma’s novel was partly inspired by the death of his friend, Jay. A fellow Nigerian immigrant and classmate of Obioma’s in Cyprus,“Jay had been duped by the middle men both into thinking the university . . . would be a springboard into Europe.” But after realizing that he had been lied to about career prospects and access to Europe, Jay was found dead from a fall after a night of drinking. Obioma says that situations like these

Keith Gessen Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of the New York Times and the author of the new book Merchants of Truth, talks with Isaac Chotiner about moral change in the media, and about how journalism (especially local journalism) will survive after the “Trump bump.” Book deals this week: Random House paid six figures for the rights to paleobiologist Thomas Halliday’s Yesterday’s Worlds, which uses the latest science to examine “deep time and revive extinct worlds—from the most recent ice age at the end of the Pleistocene period to the emergence of early multicellular creatures over 550 million