The Australian writer Richard Flanagan collected the Man Booker Prize yesterday for his book The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
The forty-eight-year-old San Francisco Bay Guardian has abruptly stopped publication; its owner, the San Francisco Media Company, is pulling funding. Today’s issue will be the last.
At Buzzfeed, Dao Nguyen has been named publisher, which means, CEO Jonah Peretti says, overseeing “tech, product, data and everything related to our publishing platform.” Nguyen has been in charge of “growth” at the website for some time, and has done very well: Buzzfeed claims to be attracting 150 million users per month. Read Peretti’s letter announcing the hire here.
At Granta, an email conversation between Sam Lipsyte and Diane Cook, who was his student. “Just writing whatever wasn’t really being a writer,” Cook says, about her early approach to her work. A writer is “someone with a creative or intellectual project that lasted not the length of a story but over years of writing many different things.”
The New York Times is releasing a digital archive of old ads, and has requested that viewers help to identify them. (The program housing the ads can’t recognize their content, so viewers will be providing the information to tag and sort them.) The first iteration of the archive holds ads from from the 1960s; subsequent decades will appear soon.
The finalists for the inaugural Kirkus Prize have been announced. Among the novels listed are Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World, Dinaw Mengestu’s All Our Names, Brian Morton’s Florence Gordon, and Sarah Waters’s The Paying Guests.
