The final installment of Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” trilogy will likely be delayed, according to the novelist. The Mirror and the Light was originally scheduled for 2018, but Mantel told an audience at her most recent BBC lecture that it was “increasingly unlikely” that the book would be published by then. But Mantel says that the delay has nothing to do with the end of the series. “People ask me if I’m having trouble killing off Thomas Cromwell,” she said. “No, why would I?”
The Wall Street Journal has closed eight of their website’s verticals, including China Real Time and Speakeasy.
At The Guardian, Rafia Zakaria looks at which writers are termed “Didion-esque” by the publishing industry, and how the category ultimately represents the book world’s lack of diversity. “The writers praised as being Didion-esque are all white and all female—and so somehow all Didion,” she writes. “It could all be brushed off as slightly annoying marketing, were it not for the requirements of being Didion-esque: the truth is that it is far harder for a writer to ‘sell someone out’ if they don’t belong to that large white swathe.”
The New York Timesprofiles Emma Allen, the new cartoon editor at the New Yorker. Editor David Remnick said that Allen first caught his eye as the editor of Daily Shouts. “She was bringing in people and things that I hadn’t heard before,” he remembered, “and sometimes you need to reinvigorate parts of the magazine.” Allen explained what she looks for in order to keep cartoons feeling fresh. “I like things that are witty. I also like dumb fart jokes,” she said. “The high-low spread is much more interesting than trying to mummify a thing and keep presenting it all over and over again.”