Kia Corthron’s novel, The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter, has been awarded the 2016 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.
Martin Amis has announced two new projects. A book of essays and reporting, The Rub of Time, will be published next October. Amis’s other project is a still-untitled autobiographical novel focused on death, which will feature Philip Larkin, Saul Bellow, and Christopher Hitchens, all of whom died after Amis had started working on the project.
An updated edition of Rebecca Solnit’s 2004 book, Hope in the Dark, has sold out since the presidential election.
Donald Trump was named Time’s Person of the Year for 2016. Managing editor Nancy Gibbs writes that the magazine chose the president-elect “for reminding America that demagoguery feeds on despair and that truth is only as powerful as the trust in those who speak it, for empowering a hidden electorate by mainstreaming its furies and live-streaming its fears, and for framing tomorrow’s political culture by demolishing yesterday’s.” The Times notes that the decision comes “to no one’s surprise.” The Hollywood Reporter collects the tweets of many readers who thought Time intentionally put horns on Trump through their cover design. In response, Time reminds us that many cover stars have had the same problem, including both Clintons and multiple popes.
Jack Dorsey spoke about Donald Trump’s Twitter use at a California conference. Although Dorsey concedes that the president-elect’s Twitter use played a large role in his campaign, Dorsey says that ultimately “America is responsible for Trump being president.”
After Tucker Carlson asked the New York Times’s public editor Liz Spayd why reporters have not been punished over political tweets, Erik Wemple notes that Carlson’s record on journalistic ethics isn’t that great.
Current and former staff of CNN and TBS have filed a discrimination lawsuit against parent company Turner. The filing cites internal statistics that show black employees regularly received lower scores on employee evaluations and were promoted less than white employees. “There is no objective factor other than race that can explain this disparity, since performance is not linked to job title or education,” the filing concludes.
Tony Tulathimutte reflects on why there isn’t yet a generational novel for millennials. In explaining why there has yet to be a literary “voice of a generation” for the twenty-first century, the Private Citizens author argues “that the “voice of a generation” novel never existed to begin with. . . . Why did we ever pretend novels by straight white guys about straight white guys spoke for entire generations?”