Hipsters have turned on Dave Eggers, reports the Globe and Mail. Justin Slaughter is a critic and journalist in Brooklyn.Eggers became a cultural icon after the release of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and the creation of McSweeneys, but his latest novel—The Circle, a “dystopian science-fiction story” about a Google-like “evil Internet empire that controls all social media”—has left many of his fans feeling as if they have been “targeted by its satire.” Hilary Mantel’s award-winning novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies are making the leap from the BBC to a PBS costume drama. The books, which chronicle “meteoric rise of [Thomas] Cromwell in the Tudor court, from his lowly start as the son of a blacksmith,” will be broadcast in 2015 and will star British actor Mark Rylance.
Joshua Cohen talks about (and reads from) his novel-in-progress, Bewildernus.
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How’s this for counter-counter-intuitive: At Flavorwire, Michelle Dean makes a case for Malcolm Gladwell’s “oversimplifying” journalism, and argues against the idea that simplifying ideas is always necessarily a bad thing.
Alice Munro decided to become a writer at fourteen, published her first story at nineteen, and was first edited by Chip McGrath at the New Yorker: Melville House collects a handful of charming facts you probably didn’t know about the recently minted Nobel Prize winner. The Taliban is apparently very happy that women’s-rights activist Malala Yousafzai—a sixteen-year-old Pakistani girl who was shot in the head for attempting to get an education—did not win the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday. Yousafzai had been the favorite for the award since the publication of her book, I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban. According to NBC and the AFP, Taliban members described the loss (the prize went to The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons) as “very good news” and praised the Nobel committee for “not selecting this immature girl for this famous award.”