Cornel West was among those arrested yesterday at a protest outside the police department in Ferguson, Missouri.
The Washington Post has announced that Carlos Lozada, currently an editor at the paper’s Outlook section, will become its new nonfiction-book critic. “This summer, Carlos developed a detailed proposal on how to reimagine the role of the nonfiction book critic for a digital age—and proceeded to pitch himself for the role,” the Post says in an announcement of the hire. “He had a great idea, and we agreed that he’d be perfect for it.”
The Man Booker Prize was opened this year to American writers, and Peter Carey, who is among the few people to have won it twice (with his novels Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang) isn’t happy. “The old Booker had a particular cultural flavour,” he said. “The Pulitzer and the National Book awards have their sorts of flavours. I suppose I’m not generally in love with the notion of global marketing.” The shortlist includes two Americans: Karen Joy Fowler and Joshua Ferris. Others on the list include the Tasmanian writer Richard Flanagan, and the British writers Ali Smith, Howard Jacobson, and Neel Mukherjee. The winner will be announced this evening.
The cover of this week’s New Yorker poignantly depicts the Bookforum offices.
The New York Times has halted the chess column. The last installment ran on Sunday.
Lena Dunham will direct a film adaptation of the YA novel Catherine, Called Birdy, a book that is, according to her, “hyper realistic and really pretty and . . . full of incest and beatings.”
