Lidia Yuknavitch Marilynne Robinson will publish the next installment of her Gilead series this year. According to the book listing, “Jack tells the story of John Ames Boughton, the black sheep of his family, the beloved and grieved-over prodigal son of a Presbyterian minister in Gilead, Iowa, a drunkard and a ne’er-do-well.” Jack will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux next October. Lidia Yuknavitch tells Literary Hub about her favorite books, the best writing advice she’s ever received, and her new book, Verge. Yuknavitch offers two pieces of writing advice: “Never surrender (Ken Kesey), and when dragged under,

Jenny Offill. Photo: Gwint For the New York Times Magazine, Parul Sehgal profiles Jenny Offill, whose new novel Weather is out next week. “Offill doesn’t write about the climate crisis but from deep within it. She does not paint pictures of apocalyptic scenarios; she charts internal cartographies. We observe her characters’ lurching shame, despair, boredom and fatigue — solastalgia experienced in ordinary life, vying with the demands of aging parents, small children, the churn of the mind,” Sehgal writes. “What she is doing, her friend the novelist Adam Ross told me, is coming as close as anyone ever has

Miranda Popkey. Photo: Elena Seibert Emily Gould and Ruth Curry are shutting down their publishing imprint, Emily Books. “When we launched the first Emily Books website, in 2011, all we knew was that we wanted to make a certain kind of book more widely available. . . . We wanted to celebrate narratives that took place outside of convention, outside of heterosexuality, outside of a world that men controlled,” they wrote in their announcement. “While we’re thrilled that the voices and stories we’ve been championing for years have lately become more ‘marketable,’ it’s made it harder for us to

Edwidge Danticat. Photo: Lynn Savarese Literary critic, professor, and novelist George Steiner has died at the age of 90. Steiner wrote over twenty books and was the New Yorker’s senior book reviewer for three decades. “Admirers of Mr. Steiner found his erudition and his arguments brilliant,” the New York Times writes. Edwidge Danticat has won the 2020 Vilcek Prize for Excellence in Literature. Danticat will receive the award at a ceremony in New York this spring. Melissa Harris-Perry is joining Zora Magazine as editor at large. Washington Post employees say that the recent suspension of reporter Felicia Sonmez is

Mary Higgins Clark. Photo © Bernard Vidal Best-selling suspense novelist Mary Higgins Clark died on Friday. She wrote more than fifty novels, and has sold more than one hundred million books. A cybersquatter has hijacked the website of novelist Patrick DeWitt, author of The Sisters Brothers and French Exit. The squatter will give the domain back to its rightful owner on one condition: DeWitt must read the squatter’s unpublished novel, In God’s Silence, Them Devils Sang. The Mellon Foundation has given a $4.5 million grant to the Academy of American Poets. HBO has released the first trailer for David

Wendy C. Ortiz. Photo: Meiko Takechi Arquillos The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has given a grant of $4.5 million to the Academy of American Poets. The money will be used “to fund its poet laureate program for the next three years,” according to the New York Times. “I have so much faith in the leadership of the Academy of American Poets, in the whole concept of the poets laureate project, and in what I think is poetry’s underrecognized ability to communicate with outsized power,” Mellon Foundation president Elizabeth Alexander said. “One thing I can promise you . . .

Tishani Doshi. Photo: Carlo Pizzati The New York Times Book Review looks at the most anticipated books to be published in February. Highlights include Emily Nemens’s The Cactus League, Gish Jen’s The Resisters, and Jenny Offill’s Weather. At Literary Hub, eighty-two writers have signed an open letter asking Oprah Winfrey to remove Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt from her book club. “Writing fiction is essentially impossible to do without imagining people who are not ourselves. However, when writing about experiences that are not our own, especially when writing about the experiences of marginalized people, still more especially when these lived

Bryan Washington. Photo: David Gracia The finalists for the 2020 PEN America Literary Awards were announced yesterday. Nominees across all nine categories include Anne Boyer’s The Undying, Ben Moser’s Sontag, Bryan Washington’s Lot, Jamil Jan Kochai’s 99 Nights in Logar, and Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror, among many others. A full list of finalists can be found here. The winners will be announced at an awards ceremony in March. Jack Fairweather has won this year’s Costa Book of the Year prize for his biography of Polish resistance fighter Witold Pilecki. BuzzFeed editor in chief Ben Smith is leaving the website

Margaret Atwood. Photo: Jean Malek Margaret Atwood is writing a new poetry collection. According to a statement by the publisher, the poems in Dearly will explore “bodies and minds in transition, as well as the everyday objects and rituals that embed us in the present.” The collection will be published by Ecco in November. Former Texas Tribune editor Emily Ramshaw and Tribune chief audience officer Amanda Zamora are starting a women-focused nonprofit news organization. The 19th, named after the amendment that granted white women the right to vote, is backed by Craigslist founder Craig Newmark among other donors. “This

Masha Gessen. Photo: Svenya Generalova According to an article by Maggie Haberman and Michael S. Schmidt, a manuscript of a book by former national security adviser John R. Bolton, given out to associates and to the White House for review, describes a conversation with Trump in August, in which the president said he planned to continue freezing $400 million in aid to Ukraine until the country helped him with investigations into rival Democrats, particularly the Bidens. The book draft also points out that Trump was at odds with Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Defense Secretary Mark T.

Garth Greenwell. Photo: Bill Adams Reagan Arthur has been named publisher of Knopf, the New York Times reports. Arthur, most recently a senior vice president and publisher at Little, Brown, will succeed Sonny Mehta, who died late last year. PBS NewsHour’s Jim Lehrer has died at age 85. Lehrer was a cofounder of the program and served as its anchor for thirty-six years. On the Maris Review, Maris Kreizman talks to Garth Greenwell about queer life in Bulgaria, the futility of looking for answers in art, and his new book, Cleanness. “The deepest questions of human life don’t have

Mona Simpson. Photo: Gaspar Tringale Mona Simpson has been chosen as the new publisher of the Paris Review. Simpson has previously been a senior editor at the magazine, as well as a professor at Bard College and UCLA. Simpson takes over for Susannah Hunnewell, who died last year. Adam Sternbergh talks to Charles Yu about television writing, imposter syndrome, and his latest book, Interior Chinatown. “Not having an M.F.A., having a day job, there was always a feeling like I came in through the back door, or at least the side door,” he said of his career. “Even to

Isabel Allende. Photo: Lori Barra Literary Hub’s Emily Temple rounds up all the literary events happening in 2020. “It’s only January, so this calendar is necessarily incomplete,” she notes. “I expect we’ll have more than a few surprises in store in this cursed (or blessed?) year of our lord 2020.” On the First Draft podcast, Mitzi Rapkin talks to Isabel Allende about literature, journalism, and her new book, A Long Petal of the Sea. “Few people allow themselves to be influenced or changed by books,” she said. “It takes a book sometimes decades, sometimes centuries, to have an effect,

Jeanine Cummins. Photo: Joe Kennedy The new Yale Review, with Meghan O’Rourke as editor, has launched with a redesigned website. O’Rourke’s first issue features essays, stories, and poetry by authors such as Cathy Park Hong, Sheila Heti, Kevin Young, and Dan Chiasson. In her introductory note, O’Rourke writes, “Every issue, like every piece of good writing, is the product of a series of accidents colliding with intentions. This is an issue that constellates around stories. Collectively, these pieces are testimony to the necessity of imaginative literature as an act of critical interrogation of the world—or the selves—we inhabit.” At

Ronan Farrow At the New Republic Alex Shephard looks at recent deals between Amazon.com and best-selling authors Dean Koontz and Patricia Cornwell. Shephard warns that this may be the beginning of a worrying trend for traditional book publishers, as Amazon bypasses the industry by acquiring, publishing, marketing, and retailing book all on their own terms. With Amazon-controlled companies like Audible, Kindle, and Amazon Prime Video also in the mix, the online giant can make an appealing pitch to lure big-name writers. Shephard argues that book publishers have grown complacent as the industry has been relatively healthy lately, divesting from

Garth Greenwell. Photo: Bill Adams The New York Times will be offering its staff editing training in 2020. The paper celebrated with an oversized custom cake bearing the words “The Year Of Editing,” and tote bags that declare “I edit the New York Times.” The editor in chief of Harper’s Bazaar, Glenda Bailey, is stepping down after nearly nineteen years of leading the magazine. At the Paris Review, an interview with Garth Greenwell about his new novel, Cleanness: “When a situation is so vertiginous, so ethically complex, so emotionally fraught, that I feel like I’m staring into an abyss—that’s

Anna Wiener. Photo: Russell Perkins The New York Times has an excerpt and a review of Zora Neale Hurston’s Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Stories from the Harlem Renaissance, a new collection that includes eight stories “recovered” from obscure periodicals and archives. Jabari Asim writes in his review: “Just as Ralph Ellison sought to wring the marvelous from the terrible, Hurston boldly found humor in the midst of tragedy and disruption.” The Atlantic has announced a new fiction section. As executive editor Adrianne LaFrance notes in her introduction to the project, “Contemplative reading might be viewed

Kiley Reid. Photo: David Goddard At Literary Hub, Such a Fun Age author Kiley Reid reflects on literary caregivers. “The literary nanny must be drawn akin to a ghost,” she writes. “The house must feel different in their presence, even if part of their role is to go unseen. They must leave things a bit differently than the family remembers. And a transaction must take place, one that far too often goes beyond a simple exchange of goods, seldom at market price. From teachers to house maids to babysitters to au pairs, the child caregiver is an essential literary

Nell Zink. Photo: Fred Filkorn The National Book Critics Circle has announced the thirty finalists for its 2020 awards. Crime Reads has posted part one of its list of this year’s most anticipated crime novels. “She didn’t seek allies or apologies; as messy as she presented herself to the world, she was clear-eyed about who she was and what she needed,” Kera Bolonick writes in a remembrance of author Elizabeth Wurtzel. “And I loved her, her intensity and loyalty, and the friends and experiences she generously shared with me. Her words and her friendship became life rafts for me

Zadie Smith. Photo: Dominique Nabokov Edwidge Danticat’s Everything Inside, Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s Sabrina Corina, and Zadie Smith’s Grand Union have been selected as finalists for this year’s Story Prize. The winner will be announced later next month. At Literary Hub, Lynne Steger Strong remembers Elizabeth Wurtzel, who died earlier this week at age 52. “Wurtzel made more space for the rest of us to write complicatedly and to get messy, to not apologize for it later, to not continually take it back,” she writes. “I am so grateful to her, for how openly and unapologetically she was.” On The Maris