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Jonathan Escoffery wins the Plimpton Prize

Jonathan Escoffery. Photo: Colwill Brown

Kerry Howley, author of the cage-fighting classic Thrown, has written a piece about Elizabeth Warren’s takedown of Michael Bloomberg (“perfect brutality”), and about the thrill that she felt while watching Warren debate. “To watch Warren explain something was to watch someone with a particularly ordered mind, capable of seizing upon a narrow question, zooming out and carrying you concisely along a set of interlocking forces,” Howley writes. “Even when you didn’t agree, you could marvel at the fluidity with which she engaged the logic of the worldview. The system may be rigged, but she can untie the knot while you watch. It was so easy for her to see the steps of any sequential argument that she could abandon herself, really, to the mood. She could play. She could engage a dramatic pause, deliver a punchline and run jauntily offstage.”

After coronavirus led to the cancelation of the London Book Fair, Reed Exhibitions released a statement confirming that Book Expo America, which is scheduled to take place May 27 through 31 in New York City, will proceed as planned.

The Paris Review has awarded its Plimpton Prize (for an outstanding work of fiction published in the magazine) to Jonathan Escoffery, and its Terry Southern Prize (for “humor, wit, and sprezzatura”) to Leigh Newman.

A Sand Book author Ariana Reines is teaching a ten-part online course on Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies. “We begin March 24 with the Aries New Moon & finish April 7 with the full moon in Libra.”

Janet Evanovich, “arguably one of the top 15 bestselling novelists in the world,” has moved to Simon and Schuster in a reported eight-figure deal.

Tomorrow (Tuesday), at McNally Jackson on Prince Street, critics Tobi Haslett, Ruth Franklin, Laura Kipnis, and Pete Wells will discuss the current state of the negative review. “How has going negative changed in the present, and does the art of the bad review have a future? Do bad reviews sting as much as they once did, and what does their afterlife look like in the age of social media?”