Finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award include Jenny Offill, for Dept. of Speculation; Emily St. John Mandel, for Station Eleven; Atticus Lish, for Preparation for the Next Life; Jennifer Clement, for Prayers for the Stolen; and Jeffery Renard Allen, for Song of the Shank. The winner will be announced April 7.
In other awards news, the longlist for the Baileys women’s prize for fiction, which has been awarded for twenty years, was just released. According to the chair of this year’s judges, Shami Chakrabarti, literary accomplishment by women still goes under-recognized: We’re still “still nowhere near where we should be,” she told The Guardian. Emily St. John Mandel is also on this list, along with Rachel Cusk, Sarah Waters, Ali Smith, and many others.
Yesterday morning, the ACLU—along with the Wikimedia Foundation, Amnesty International, and the PEN American Center—filed a complaint against the NSA for its wide-reaching data-collection practices. The lawsuit argues that the NSA’s “upstream” surveillance, as it’s often called, violates the Fourth Amendment and the First Amendment. In a New York Timesop-ed, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales explains: “The harm to Wikimedia and the hundreds of millions of people who visit our websites is clear: Pervasive surveillance has a chilling effect. It stifles freedom of expression and the free exchange of knowledge that Wikimedia was designed to enable.”
The tech news site Gigaom is shutting down. Founded by former Forbes columnist Om Malik, the site has been around for nine years, and reported an average of 6.5 million monthly unique users. A statement said that the company ceased operations because it was unable to pay its creditors. It does not, however, intend to file bankruptcy.
At the New York Times magazine, a personal account from the novelist Marlon James, the author, most recently, of A Brief History of Seven Killings (which Emily Raboteau reviewed for Bookforum in our fall issue). A Brief History was also featured yesterday on the Morning News’ Tournament of Books, winning against Evie Wyld’s All the Birds, Singing.