Manhattan has lost forty-four bookstores in twelve years—among them, Spring Street Books, Coliseum Books, Shakespeare and Company, Endicott Booksellers, and Murder Ink. Sarah McNally, of Manhattan’s McNally Jackson, plans to open her store’s second location in Brooklyn. In the New Yorker, Rebecca Mead points to Brooklyn’s thriving independent-bookstore culture, only to lament “a certain kind of book-buying innocence—a time when where one bought a book did not constitute a political statement, and reading it did not feel like participating in a requiem.”
The Morning News Tournament of Books enters the championship round, with the entire panel of judges weighing in on the two final contestants, James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird and Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life.
Malcolm Harris on what’s wrong with data journalism.
Ruth Franklin has compiled a playlist of music important to Shirley Jackson: Paganini, Wagner, lots of Bessie Smith.
Girls protagonist Hannah Horvath may go to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Here’s what awaits her there.
ASME has announced their National Magazine award nominees for 2014.
Jim Sleeper remembers Jonathan Schell.