Cathleen Schine talks to the New York Times By the Book section about contemporary fiction, why she avoids literary dinner parties, and her new book, The Grammarians. “Many years ago, as a 30-year-old, I attended a dinner party with a number of well-known New York writers,” she said. “I spent an excruciating evening among these very successful, older writers, trying not to spill my wine and wondering if I should pretend I had read ‘The Bonfire of the Vanities’ and tell Tom Wolfe, who was sitting next to me, how much I liked it. I did not, which is a good thing, because I realized when I got

At Longreads, Naomi Elias talks to Bassey Ikpi about memory, truth, and her new book, I’m Telling the Truth but I’m Lying. “What I tried to do was be very honest about the things I couldn’t remember,” she said of the book. “What was difficult was, the first book that we actually sold was supposed to be this — now that I think about it, I laugh — this self-help book, like a ‘this is how I got here’ kind of thing; and it was just impossible to do. Where am I? I didn’t get anywhere. In order for me to get to the point where I wanted to write this self-help book, I had to acknowledge the fact that

The Cut talks to Rachel Monroe about true crime, empathy, and her new book, Savage Appetites. “People talk about being fascinated by true crime because they empathize with the victims. Empathy can be a positive force, but there’s so much bias built into empathy, and I think as white women, if you’re not thinking about what you’re doing, the stories we empathize with are just other stories about white women,” she said. “Empathy can blind us to pain that doesn’t look like our own.”

Facebook is hiring a “small team” of journalists to select featured content for their news tab, Digiday reports.

Suketu Mehta talks to The Guardian about immigration, history, and his new book, This Land Is Our Land. “I am a migrant, but I’m also an American. My taxes financed an illegal and incredibly bloody war that plunged the whole of the Middle East into turmoil. I’m the recipient of an economy that is fouling the atmosphere. So I’m certainly enjoying my privilege here and deeply implicated in all of this,” he said. “Yet I’m always shocked by the lack of historical awareness on the part of the average American. Many of the people who have come here did so to forget history, to turn their backs on

The buzz is building for Margaret Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, which is due out in September.

Journalist Mark Halperin—author of Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime—has sold his new book, How to Beat Trump: America’s Top Political Strategists on What It Will Take, to Regan Arts. The book, which will come out in November, will draw on extensive interviews with Democratic strategists such as Donna Brazile, James Carville, Jennifer Granholm, and Kathleen Sebelius. Halperin was in the news most recently after multiple women accused him of

The Maris Review talks to Lyz Lenz about christianity, politics, and her new book, God Land. “Christianity has become so twisted up in our concept of nationalism that what we practice has very little to do with actual theology and more to do with ideas of belonging, morality, and moral capital,” she said. “It helps you self-identify in your space, and that has absolutely nothing to do with theology. That has everything to do with the way we practice Americanism and internationalism, and it’s really toxic.”

The Guardian has announced the nominees for the 4th Estate Short Story Prize. Authors

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 Maniac author Juliet Escoria tells Brad Listi on

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 New Yorker last year.

“I’m not a big fan of ‘quirky,’ Marilou Is Everywhere author Sarah Elaine Smith tells

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, Jesmyn Ward talks to Ta-Nehisi

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,” according to The

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 joining New

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 followed by afterwords that detail her experience creating