Moira Donegan Moira Donegan is writing a book. The still-untitled book was bought by Scribner and will be a “primer on sexual harassment and assault as a lived experience” and explore the “moral and political challenge” that it presents for feminists. The Cut talks to Robbie Kaplan, the lawyer defending Donegan in the lawsuit brought against her by Stephen Elliott. The New York Times’s Parul Sehgal explores the prevalence of ghost stories in modern literature, which she writes is “positively ectoplasmic these days, crawling with hauntings, haints and wraiths of every stripe and disposition.” Danielle Dutton and Martin Riker

Karen Russell The Long Black Veil author Jennifer Finney Boylan responds to Trump’s ban on transgender troops: “Even if trans issues don’t top the list of things you’re worried about, you should be appalled by the latest episode of kick-the-soldier, because it lays bare the fact that Mr. Trump is never motivated by policy, or research, or rationality. The only thing that matters to him is bigotry.” Karen Russell, the author of the Pulitzer-nominated novel Swamplandia, has sold two books to Knopf: the story collection Orange World (the title story of which ran in the New Yorker) and the

Jennifer Egan The Washington Post has published Jamal Khashoggi’s final column, which was sent to them by Khashoggi’s assistant and translator the day after he went missing. “Arab governments have been given free rein to continue silencing the media at an increasing rate,” he wrote in a call for press freedom in the Arab world. PEN America president Jennifer Egan explains why the organization filed a lawsuit against President Trump earlier this week. “The president has done more than vent against the press: he has threatened to use his presidential powers to stymie reporters and news organizations, and has

Tana French. Photo: Kathrin Baumbach Vanity Fair’s Joe Pompeo talks to staff at the Washington Post, where columnist Jamal Khashoggi’s disappearance and possible murder have pushed his colleagues “into a frenzy.” “Even people who aren’t involved in the coverage are all talking about it,” said one journalist. “How’s the administration gonna respond? What does this mean for our other overseas journalists?” Craigslist founder Craig Newmark is donating $2.5 million to New York Public Radio, bringing “his total philanthropic efforts involving media in the last year to $50 million,” the New York Times reports. “I had been thinking a lot

Anna Burns Anna Burns’s Milkman has won the 2018 Man Booker Prize, making Burns the first Northern Irish author to win. “None of us has ever read anything like this before,” said judging chair Kwame Anthony Appiah. “Anna Burns’ utterly distinctive voice challenges conventional thinking and form in surprising and immersive prose. It is a story of brutality, sexual encroachment and resistance threaded with mordant humour.” The Guardian’s Claire Amistad writes that although the story, which draws on Burns’s experiences growing up in Ireland during the Troubles, “is relentlessly internalised” and lacks “conventions such as paragraphing,” the book is

Rebecca Ley. Photo: Jennifer Moyes At the New York Times, Alex Marshall talks to Val McDermid, a judge for this year’s Man Booker Prize. “We all agreed if any of us absolutely hated a book, we wouldn’t put it forward,” McDermid said of the judging process. “But we’re there to find a winner, not personal taste. We’ve all lost books that we loved along the way — that spoke to us in a very personal way, maybe due to our experiences in life or the place where we were.” McDermid and the four other judges meet today “in a

Ariana Reines The “Alternative Nobel Prize” in literature has been awarded to the Guadeloupean novelist Maryse Condé, author of novels including Desirada, Segu, and Crossing the Mangrove. The New Academy Prize was created after the Nobels were canceled this year, and serve “as a reminder that literature should be associated with democracy, openness, empathy and respect.” According to the chair of judges Ann Pålsson, Condé is a “grand storyteller” who “describes the ravages of colonialism and the post-colonial chaos in a language which is both precise and overwhelming.” According to Publisher’s Weekly, “a sense of calm has returned” to

Haruki Murakami Stephen Elliott has filed a lawsuit against Shitty Media Men List creator Moira Donegan for emotional distress and libel, The Cut reports. Other defendants included in the suit are several anonymous contributors to the list, who Elliott plans to identify by subpoenaing metadata from Google.  At Columbia Journalism Review, Sulome Anderson reflects on the news coverage of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was reportedly abducted and possibly killed inside the Saudi Arabian consulate in Turkey this month. Lauren van den Berg and Jeff Jackson discuss the challenges of writing violence. At Lithub, Mira Jacob talks to Nicole Chung

Colson Whitehead. Photo: Dorothy Hong Colson Whitehead is working on a new novel. Inspired by the real-life story of the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, The Nickel Boys follows two black teens sent to a reform school in 1960s Florida. “It was emblematic of so many injustices that go on every day that you never hear about,” Whitehead said of the school. “The survivors are never heard from and the guilty are never punished, they live to a ripe old age while their victims are damaged for life. It seemed like a story worth taking up.” The Nickel

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie The Guardian’s Alison Flood reports from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s acceptance lecture for the PEN Pinter prize yesterday. “Art can illuminate politics. Art can humanise politics. Art can shine the light towards truth. But sometimes that is not enough,” she said. “Sometimes politics must be engaged with as politics. And this could not be any truer or more urgent today. . . . We must know what is true. And we must call a lie a lie.” Maggie Gyllenhaal is writing, producing, and directing a movie based on Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter. Gyllenhaal says she spent

Barbara Kingsolver. Photo: Annie Griffiths At The Guardian, Lidija Haas talks to Barbara Kingsolver about conflict, the end times, and her new book, Unsheltered. “What do people do when it feels like they’re living through the end of the world as we know it? Because that’s what it seems like we’re doing right now, and almost nobody disagrees,” Kingsolver said. “And maybe people said that 10 years ago, but now they’re really saying ‘WTF?’” Alexandra Alter explores why women are channeling their anger and anxiety over the current political moment into writing dystopian fiction. “I felt like I didn’t

Anne Carson Tonight is the final performance of David Lang’s immersive Mile-Long Opera: A Biography of 7 O’Clock, which is being performed on the Highline. The audience wanders among the one-thousand performers, who are singing words composed by the poet-essayists Anne Carson and Claudia Rankine.  Fiction writers Kelly Link and John Keene, poet Natalie Diaz, and playwright Dominique Morisseau have been awarded MacArthur Fellowships, aka “genius grants.” In the latest installment of “Ask Greil,” Greil Marcus explains why Charles Manson wasn’t interesting and answers a number of reader questions, such as: “have you ever considered writing a novel?” And:

Julia Turner At Lithub, read Sarah Nicole Prickett’s introduction to Gary Indiana’s Gone Tomorrow. “Hemingway is at once kinder and more lost than we give him credit for. He has an excellent sense of humor,” writes Mikaella Clements on the subtle queerness of Ernest Hemingway’s work. “He is often very emotional. His portrayal of women is certainly misogynistic, but it is also complicated, mixed with longing and terror; very often, his women are the most nuanced characters on the page.” “I am reluctant to name any particular book or author whom I feel is overrated, etc.; it is so

Caitriona Lally New York Times opinion columnist Bari Weiss has signed a book deal. The New Seven Dirty Words will take “a deep look at our new culture of censorship and censoriousness and makes the case for reviving the virtues that are essential for an open society.” The book will be published by Henry Holt in 2020. New York Times deputy Metro editor Amy Virshup is taking over as the paper’s travel editor. The Washington Post reports on Caitriona Lally, who just won the Rooney Prize for literature from Trinity College Dublin. Lally, who also works at the college

Nicole Chung. Photo: Erica B. Tappis Victoria Namkung talks to Nicole Chung about transracial adoption, motherhood, and her new book, All You Can Ever Know. “Even though it wasn’t the whole truth, I was so comforted and so attached to this origin story I was given. I remember how difficult it was to start challenging that in my own head and reconsidering my own adoption story,” Chung said. “The story I had was never enough and I’ve just been telling it ever since, mostly within my family and to my kids, and now it’s changing with this book about

Myriam Gurba. Photo: David Naz Former ESPN broadcaster Jemele Hill is joining The Atlantic as a staff writer. In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Hill addressed her departure from the sports network, social media, and being a black journalist in the sports world. “Mike (Smith) and I specifically were called political, way before any of the Trump stuff ever happened,” Hill recalled of her experience hosting SportsCenter with Smith. “And I always thought that was a very interesting label, because frankly, I think that most of the time it was said because we were the two black people.”

Deborah Eisenberg Sarah Hepola, the author of the memoir Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget, considers Brett Kavanaugh’s claim during his Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last week that he has never blacked out from drinking (Hepola calls Kavanaugh’s claim that he has “gone to sleep” after drinking a “semantic dodge”). She also delves into a memoir by Mark Judge, whom Christine Blasey Ford says attacked her with Kavanaugh. In Wasted: Tales of a Gen X Drunk (which is reportedly extremely hard to find), Judge describes the behavior that led him to get sober, including “a wedding rehearsal

Margo Jefferson At The Millions, Raksha Vasudevan talks to Margo Jefferson about feminism, whiteness, and combining criticism and memoir in her 2015 book Negroland. “I’d spent my writing life as a critic. My initial feeling was that those kinds of tones and voices had to go; this was memoir,” she said. “But then, I realized, no, that was as much a fixed part of my identity as other things. I realized I had to include the critic who is diagnosing, who is assessing, who is judging against a kind of backdrop that is aesthetic, cultural, political.” PEN International and

Jess Row At the Columbia Journalism Review, Michael Rosenwald compares the press coverage of Anita Hill’s testimony against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to the coverage of Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. New York magazine is partnering with nonprofit news site The City to improve local news coverage in the New York area. Former Daily News editor Jere Hester will lead a team of around fifteen journalists in coverage of affordable housing, education, health care, and transportation, among other topics. The Whiting Foundation has announced its 2018 creative nonfiction grant recipients. The winners include

Kiese Laymon The finalists for the 2018 Kirkus Prize have been announced. Nominees include Naima Coster’s Halsey Street, Lauren Groff’s Florida, Ling Ma’s Severance, Beth Macy’s Dopesick, and Kiese Laymon’s Heavy. The winner will be announced in October. Ben Fountain talks to Rolling Stone about the 2016 election, moving from fiction to journalism, and his new book, Beautiful Country Burn Again. Over one hundred contributors to the New York Review of Books, including Luc Sante, Janet Malcolm, and Colm Tóibín,have signed an open letter criticizing the magazine’s termination of editor Ian Buruma. “The project that Me Too has advanced