Esmé Weijun Wang. Photo: Kristin Cofer Esmé Weijun Wang has signed a two-book deal with Riverhead, Entertainment Weekly reports. The announcement included details about the two upcoming titles: Soft Animals will be a novel “about a chronically ill woman who moves into a small-town lodge with her volatile husband after inheriting it from the parents of a hate-crime victim,” while The Unexpected Shape will be a nonfiction book that explores “the balance between ambition and limitation in contemporary life.” Publication dates have not been announced. The 2019 Nobel literature laureates have given their lectures. Olga Tokarczuk spoke about media,

Jia Tolentino In our favorite podcast of the week, book critic Parul Sehgal discusses Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley series with Terry Castle, Gillian Flynn, and Hanya Yanagihara. Highlight: when Alexander Chee compares Ripley to Bugs Bunny. Oprah magazine has posted a list of “31 LGBTQ Books That’ll Change the Literary Landscape in 2020.” Included on the list are novels by Garth Greenwell and Ilana Masad, poetry collections by Danez Smith and Mark Bibbins, debuts by Kate Milliken and Tomasz Jedrowski, memoirs by Jennifer Finney Boylan and Paul Lisicky, genre-defying work by Jenn Shapland, and more. Speaking of best-of lists, David

Lisa Taddeo. Photo: J. Waite The Pulitzer Prize Board has created a new Audio Reporting award category for 2020. “The renaissance of audio journalism in recent years has given rise to an extraordinary array of non-fiction storytelling,” Pulitzer administrator Dana Canedy said in a statement. “To recognize the best of that work, the Pulitzer Board is launching an experimental category to honor it.” The Guardian talks to Lisa Taddeo about nuance, intimacy, and her recent book, Three Women. “We don’t want to see ourselves sometimes,” she said of the negative reaction to her book. “I’ve always liked to see

Akwaeke Emezi. Photo: Elizabeth Wirija The 2019 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program recipients have been announced. Grantees include Jillian Steinhauer, Elvia Wilk, and more. Starting next month, Doreen St. Felix will be writing the television column for the New Yorker. The television rights to Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne novels have been bought by AMC Studios, Deadline reports. At The Believer, Sharon Marcus reflects on capitalism, bildungsromans, and Sally Rooney. “What happens to coming-of-age tales when young people who have been assigned little value beyond their capacity for labor no longer have any labor to perform?” she asks. “And

Naja Marie Aidt. Photo: Mikkel Tjellesen “I questioned myself many times: why would I take on the pain of writing this book––writing it in the middle of my raw grief, in the middle of my shock and my trauma?” Naja Marie Aidt tells John Freeman about writing her recently published book, When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back. “I didn’t want my son’s story to kind of meld into every book I would write in the future, and I also knew, most importantly, that, you know, I was completely changed as a human being, as a person,

Kristen Arnett. Photo: Maria Jones The New Yorker’s Katy Waldman lists her best books of 2019. Favorites include Kristen Arnett’s Mostly Dead Things, Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, and Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other. Two members of a Nobel Prize in Literature reform committee resigned yesterday, The Guardian reports. According to the paper, one of the departing members left because “the work to change the culture in the Swedish Academy was taking too long.” The Maris Review talks to Lane Moore about trauma, experience, and her new memoir, How to Be Alone: If You Want To, and

Australian critic, poet, and TV personality Clive James died last week. The author of many books (including Cultural Amnesia, which included appreciations of modern artists and thinkers, and a tribute to Philip Larkin), reviews, as well as pieces on Princess Diana, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and much, much more, James was funny, insightful, and deeply influential. A 2003 profile of James by A.O. Scott was titled “The Hungriest Critic of All.” According to Leo Robson in the New Statesman: “The writer I wanted to learn from was Clive James.” His writing is “alive in every phrase,” says Adam Gopnik in the

Jill Filipovic Jill Filipovic is writing a new book. OK Boomer: Let’s Talk: Dispatches from a Generational Divide will “look beyond the ‘humorous meme’ and explore issues such as student debt, healthcare and climate change.” OK Boomer will be published by One Signal Books in late 2020. The New York Public Library has released its list of the one hundred best books of 2019. The top ten includes Sally Rooney’s Normal People, Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, and Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Thick. At Literary Hub, Tarisai Ngangura explores the storytelling legacies of Jay-Z and Rakim and reflects

Amitav Ghosh. Photo: Ivo van der Bent Amitav Ghosh talks to First Draft about what he wants readers to take away from his new novel, Gun Island. “I want them to come away with . . . the sense that the world is much stranger than we think, and the ways in which our world is changing is itself very strange, very uncanny, and very disturbing,” he said. “We have to try to grapple with it and make sense of it.” In the New York Times Book Review, Parul Sehgal looks at how women’s anger has featured in the

Christopher Hitchens Eric Banks and Robert Boynton have started posting recordings of lectures that have been given at the New York Institute for the Humanities. A few highlights so far: Ryszard Kapuscinski’s 2004 discussion of Herodotus, Susan Sontag’s 1977 lecture on “Illness as Metaphor,” and James Fenton’s interview of Christopher Hitchens about the latter’s memoir Hitch-22. You can find those recordings and more here. The New York Times spotlights New Jersey’s Montclair Book Center, a 9,000-square-foot “throwback to a funkier, more literate time,” which is stocked with hundreds of thousands of best sellers, hidden treasures, and titles you “don’t

Deborah Levy. Photo: Sheila Burnett Betrayal: The Life and Lies of Bernie Madoff author Andrew Kirtzman is writing a biography of Rudy Giuliani. “Giuliani has led an operatic life,” Simon Schuster editor Bob Bender said in a statement. “Andrew has been writing about him since his days as a City Hall reporter in the 1990s, and has an intuitive understanding of this extraordinarily polarizing figure. It’s a perfect match of author and subject.” The still-untitled book will be published in 2021. At Vanity Fair, Maris Kreizman explains why the big-five publishers continue to publish works by controversial right-wing authors.

Susan Choi The winners of this year’s National Book Awards have been announced. Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise won the fiction prize, Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House won the nonfiction prize, and Laszlo Krasznahorkai and Ottile Muzlet won the translated literature prize for Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming. After a three-year hiatus, Trump has selected the winners of the National Medal of the Arts and the National Humanities Medal, the New York Times reports. Honorees include “the actor Jon Voight, the novelist James Patterson, the musicians of the United States Military and the conservative think tank the Claremont Institute.” HarperCollins is

Sarah M. Broom. Photo: Adam Shemper At the Paris Review, Sarah M. Broom reflects on money, unfinished work, and how she wrote her debut memoir, The Yellow House. “I thought, at first, that I would simply follow the chain of the title to write an autobiography of a house. I had no idea of the tentacles, the ways in which the story would transfigure,” she writes. “After several halting years, stopping to earn money in order to write, I began to work less toward my vision and more toward the book that I could afford. How, I wondered, could

Julia Phillips Random House editor in chief Andy Ward will succeed the late Susan Kamil as the imprint’s executive vice president and publisher, the New York Times reports. In a memo announcing the move to staff, publisher Gina Centrello “noted that Ms. Kamil had expressed her hope that Mr. Ward might one day take over her role.” Knopf editorial director Robin Desser will replace Ward as editor in chief of Random House. After Swedish PEN awarded its annual Tucholsky prize to imprisoned Hong Kong bookseller Gui Minhai, the Chinese embassy in the country has told Sweden that it will

Margo Jefferson. Photo: Michael Lionstar Tonight at the New York Public Library, Darryl Pinckney will discuss Busted in New York, his new book of essays about race in America, with Pulitzer Prize–winning critic and author Margo Jefferson. In May, the writer Aatish Taseer wrote a story for Time magazine titled “India’s Divider in Chief,” which was critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Last week, the Indian government stripped Taseer of his overseas citizenship, which means that he will never be able to return to India. Now, more than two hundred and fifty writers, including Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood,

Angie Cruz. Photo: Erika Morillo The Aspen Words Literary Prize longlist was released yesterday. Nominees include Angie Cruz’s Dominicana, Steph Cha’s Your House Will Pay, Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive, and Bryan Washington’s Lot. The shortlist will be announced in February. Turkish journalist Ahmet Altan, who was released from prison last week after being imprisoned since 2016, has been rearrested “after the chief public prosecutor appealed against the decision to release” him, The Guardian reports. Columbia Journalism Review’s CNN public editor Emily Tamkin reflects on the network’s use of clever chyrons that have been praised for effectively calling out

Lucy Ellmann. Photo: Amy Jordison Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport has won the Goldsmiths prize. Judging chair Erica Wagner said the novel was a “rare thing: a book which, not long after its publication, one can unhesitatingly call a masterpiece.” Larissa Pham has sold a book to Catapult. How to Run Away will be “about intimacy and art and distances, from the miles that we travel to get away from ourselves to the impossible chasm that can exist between two people sharing a bed.” Elizabeth Bishop’s Key West home has been bought by the Key West Literary Seminar for $1.2

Toni Morrison. Photo: John Mathew Smith Tomorrow night at the New York Institute for the Humanities, Hanif Abdurraqib will present the institute’s fourth annual humanities lecture, “The Intersections of Mundane Pleasures.” In his talk, Abdurraqip “will explore how our living in and throughout the world is also an act of writing, focusing on curiosity, rigid ideas around genre, and the way living can influence and foster curiosity.” The event is free and open to the public; RSVP here. A public memorial will be held for Toni Morrison in New York later this month. The event will take place at

Jaquira Díaz. Photo: Maria Esquinca Ordinary Girls author Jaquira Díaz talks to Literary Hub about villains, music, and how she motivates herself to write. “I think of all the straight cis white men I was forced to read in school. I think of all the queer AfroLatinxs who never saw themselves in books,” she said. “I think of all the books I needed growing up.” The longlist for the Dublin Literary Award has been announced. More than 150 books are in the running for the €100,000 prize. Editorial and digital employees across two dozen Hearst magazines are unionizing, the

Stepen Dixon Associated Press sources say that former Trump adviser John Bolton has signed a book deal with Simon Schuster, for a reported $2 million. According to the New York Times, Bolton is represented by the Javelin literary agency, whose other clients include former FBI Director James Comey and the anonymous Trump administration official, whose much-anticipated A Warning will be released on November 19. Bolton’s book will, according to his publisher, be released before the 2020 elections. Novelist Stephen Dixon has died. He was eighty-three years old. The Times obituary calls him “experimental,” and his work could be thrillingly