Kevin Jared Hosein has won the Commonwealth Prize for his short story, “Passage,” which was written in Trinidadian English Creole. Although Hosein was concerned that readers might not understand the language, novelist and Commonwealth Prize jury chair Sarah Hall said that the story was a quick favorite. “It balances between formal language and demotic, ideas of civility and ferality, is tightly woven and suspenseful, beautifully and eerily atmospheric, and finally surprising,” she said.
Daniel Kolitz attends the fifth annual David Foster Wallace Conference in Illinois, where organizers and attendees wonder how to “negotiate the fact that we have a brilliant author who did some despicable things.”
Entertainment Weekly’s David Canfield looks at the summer books that have topped the New York Times bestseller list, which until recently was occupied almost entirely by political books.
Troy Young has been named president of Hearst. Young will replace David Carey, who is retiring at the end of the year.
Joanna Rothkopf has been hired as the deputy editor of Esquire.com. Rothkopf was most recently a senior editor at Jezebel.
At Vulture, Christian Lorentzen reviews Nico Walker’s debut novel about war, addiction, and incarceration. “Cherry provides a meticulous narrative of opioid addiction, one of the most detailed account I’ve seen in American lit . . . since we became aware that the country was experiencing an epidemic. There’s less an arc or a downward spiral than a very gradual sinking.”
Tonight at McNally Jackson Books in Manhattan, Emma Cline talks to Lexi Freiman about her new book Inappropriation.