Juliet Escoria The Atlantic’s Taylor Lorenz is joining the New York Times Styles section. “Taylor Lorenz beat the Styles desk on three stories in one month. We had some options about how to handle that,” editor Choire Sicha said in a statement. “The easiest and most humane solution was . . . we hired her.” The National Endowment for the Arts has announced the recipients of $29 million in grants. “I do feel like a memoir implies that you learn something. I definitely did learn something by my experiences, but that wasn’t what I was interested in,” Juliet the

Yoko Ogawa. Photo: Tadashi Okochi The New York Times talks to Yoko Ogawa about writing, motherhood, and her recently-translated book, The Memory Police. “Now that my son has grown, I feel like I was at my happiest when I was writing while raising my child,” she said. “Now that I can write as much as I want 24 hours a day, it’s not as if I produce any greater work now than I did in the past.” Netflix has bought the rights to Pyros, a series based on Thomas Pierce’s short story “Tardy Man,” which was published in the

Ta-Nehisi Coates. Photo: Gregory Halpern After analyzing the words of Rush Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson, and others, the New York Times has concluded that “there is a striking degree of overlap between the words of right-wing media personalities and the language used by the Texas man who confessed to killing 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso this month.” Staff of The Ringer have unionized with Writers’ Guild of America East. The Guardian has released the shortlist for their “Not the Booker” prize. Nominees include Ali Smith’s Spring, Lara Williams’s Supepr Club, and Robbie Arnott’s Flames. At Vanity Fair,

After the news of Toni Morrison’s death last week, the New Yorker decided to pay tribute to the author on the cover of its next issue. Under a tight deadline, art director Françoise Mouly reached out to artist Kara Walker created Quiet as It’s Kept, the cover illustration for the magazine’s August 19 issue, in less than twenty-four hours. Nine stories that Marcel Proust wrote in the 1890s but kept secret are going to be published by Éditions de Fallois in France in October. The author presumably kept the stories to himself because they touch on “themes of homosexuality,”

Bryan Washington At The Guardian, Richard Lea talks to Bryan Washington about homophobia, Houston, and his story collection, Lot. “There is no singular experience – there’s no story I could have written that would have encapsulated what it meant or what it could mean to live in the city,” Washington says of his hometown. “And I don’t think there’s any author who’s going to do that, just because there’s such a multiplicity of experiences in this particular city.” Entertainment Weekly has the trailer for the film adaptation of James Frey’s fabricated memoir A Million Little Pieces. Molly Young is

Nicholas Jackson. Photo: Terence Patrick Model, dietitian, and Elon Musk’s mother Maye Musk is publishing a book. According to the press release, A Woman Makes a Plan: Advice for a Lifetime of Adventure, Beauty, and Success will be “a fount of frank and practical advice on how the choices you make in every decade can pay off in surprising, exciting ways throughout your life.” The book will be published in December by Viking. Phoebe Waller-Bridge is working on a book based on her BBC show. Fleabag: Scriptures will include scripts from both seasons of the show, which will be

Jia Tolentino. Photo: Elena Mudd Atlantic staff writer and former ESPN correspondent Jemele Hill is working on a memoir. “I hope that by sharing some very personal experiences in this memoir—things I’ve never shared publicly before—people will have a better understanding of who I am,” Hill said in a press release. The still-untitled book will be published in 2021 by Henry Holt. Hillary and Chelsea Clinton are writing a book. The Book of Gutsy Women: Favorite Stories of Courage and Resilience celebrates “the women who have inspired them throughout their lives” and their “histories that all too often get

Toni Morrison. Photo: John Mathew Smith Toni Morrison died last night in Manhattan. She was 88. The author of eleven novels and a number of essay collections, Morrison was also the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature and the first black woman to work as an editor at Random House. At The Millions, S. Kirk Walsh talks to Karen Olsson about Anne Carson, the struggles of novel-writing, and her new book, The Weil Conjectures: On Math and the Pursuit of the Unknown. “I loved reading and thinking about math after so many years away, and

Jenny Lee’s Anna K, the anticipated YA retelling of Anna Karenina set in present-day Manhattan (with a hint of Gossip Girl), will be published in early 2020, and will become a TV series shortly after that. Entertainment Weekly has an excerpt… Adam Mansbach has sold his book I Had a Brother Once, an “epic poem” about the suicide of the author’s brother, to One World, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Mansbach is the author of the novels Angry Black White Boy and The End of the Jews, but he is most famous for the mock children’s book Go

Edward Snowden Edward Snowden is writing a memoir. Permanent Record, which details how Snowden “helped create a system of mass surveillance the N.S.A. used to collect information on hundreds of millions of United States citizens and others, as well as the ‘crisis of conscience’ that led him to rebuke the system he helped create,” will be published by Metropolitan in September. Washington Post columnist Alexandra Petri has signed a two-book deal with Norton. One will be “a humor collection exploring the dark absurdity of the Trump era,” and the other “a satirical history of the United States.” This year’s

Juliet Escoria At The Nation, over three dozen writers have signed an open letter urging Congress “to take immediate steps to rectify the atrocious conditions for asylum seekers being detained today.” At The Millions, Jeff Jackson talks to Juliet Escoria about mental illness and why she chose an unconventional narrative structure for her new book, Juliet the Maniac. “In popular culture, a lot of times mental illness and/or addiction narratives are presented as: cause, effect, consequence, remedy. For me, this linear presentation was a lie,” she said. “You have a normal day, and then a completely warped one. Certain

Melissa Gira Grant. Photo: Noah Kalina “Press coverage of Delia Owens since the runaway success of Where the Crawdads Sing has focused on her tomboy girlhood, her passion for helping African wildlife, and the pristine isolation of her Idaho home, portraying her as nearly as unspoiled as her heroine. But Owens’ past is far more dark and troubling than that,” writes Slate’s Laura Miller. “What most of Crawdads’ fans don’t know is that Delia and Mark Owens have been advised never to return to one of the African nations where they once lived and worked, Zambia, because they are

The founder of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Corbin Gwaltney, has died at the age of ninety-seven. Gwaltney founded the paper in 1966 as an outlet for serious reporting about colleges and was active at the publication well into his seventies. According to the Chronicle’s obituary, Gwaltney was a passionate, independent, and careful editor: “For years he read every word destined to be printed in the newspaper, approved all page designs and photo choices, and was the final arbiter of all grammar and style questions.” “I was always an observer and I’m not sure that really being an insider

Delia Owens Delia Owens’s debut novel, Where the Crawdads Sing—the surprise-hit romance-mystery set in 1950s North Carolina—has now sold more than 1 million copies this year. Amazon recently banned the sale of books by Dr. Joseph Nicolosi and other proponents of “gay-conversion therapy.” At VICE, Daniel Newhauser reports that House Republicans are now pressuring Amazon to resume selling those books, including Nicolosi’s A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality. According to a document circulated by the Republicans: “These books were available on Amazon until an LGBT activist repeatedly petitioned Amazon to remove the ‘homophobic books’ from the company’s website. Amazon

Namwali Serpell. Photo: Peg Skorpinski The longlist for the 2019 Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize has been announced. Nominees include Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift, Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Lauren Wilkinson’s American Spy, and Elvia Wilk’s Oval. The shortlist will be announced in September. The photo archives of Ebony and Jet magazines have been sold for $30 million to “a consortium of foundations led by the J. Paul Getty Trust,” the Chicago Tribune reports. The group plans to give the photos to a number of cultural institutions “to ensure public access and use by scholars,

Kate Zambreno Tobias Carroll talks to Kate Zambreno about Rilke, art writing, and her latest book, Screen Tests. “I love it when a work references past books; it’s like a little thrill for me,” she said. “At the opening of Wittengstein’s Nephew, Thomas Bernhard’s narrator reviews a bound copy of Gargoyles [one of Bernhard’s early novels]; one of the nuns puts it on his bed in the hospital where he’s recovering from consumption, and he feels kind of alienated and disgusted by it. I love that this is also the experience for me of looking at a book that

Valeria Luiselli. Photo: Diego Berruecos The longlist for this year’s Booker Prize has been announced. Nominees include Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, Max Porter’s Lanny, Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive, and John Lanchester’s The Wall. The shortlist will be announced in September. A n+1, Mark Greif tries to decode and untangle volume one of the Mueller Report, a document he finds both damning of the Trump campaign and also very difficult to follow. (Indeed, many lawmakers have confessed that they haven’t really read it.) The report’s basic opaqueness has led to serious misreadings, as Greif writes: “Each time a newspaper

Helen Phillips. Photo: Andy Vernon-Jones The 2019 Dayton Literary Peace Prize’s Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award has been given to N. Scott Momaday. At Literary Hub, Brian Gresko talks to Helen Phillips about loss, raising children, and her new novel, The Need. “Having a child feels like such a unique experience. Except it’s not, it’s the most basic human experience,” Phillips said. “I tell my students: you can find the universal in the most personal of details.” Charly Wilder wanders Berlin in search of traces of writer Audre Lorde, who lived in the city off and on between

Roxane Gay Roxane Gay, the author of Bad Feminist and other books, has a new book club, which is airing on Vice News. “We’re going to drink some alcohol, we’re going to talk about books, and we’re going to get a little petty.” The first book she discusses—with Mira Jacob, Mike Eagle, and Debbie Millman—is Colson Whitehead’s Nickel Boys. At Public Books, Dan Sinykin has published an essay about how capitalism has shaped American literature. “Fifty years ago,” he begins, “almost every publisher in the United States was independent.” Not so anymore. We are well into the “conglomerate era,”

Laura Lippman At the New York Times, Jennifer Miller wonders if we’ve “hit peak podcast.” Currently, there are more than 700,000 podcasts available for listening, and up to 3,000 new ones started each month. “We’re not necessarily sick of listening to interesting programs” she writes, “but we’re definitely tired of hearing from every friend, relative and co-worker who thinks they’re just an iPhone recording away from creating the next ‘Serial.’” Paul Holdengraber talks to John Waters about summer reading, working at Mary Oliver’s bookstore, and his new memoir, Mr. Know-It-All. The 2019 Whiting Literary Magazine Prizes have been awarded.