Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport has won the Goldsmiths prize. Judging chair Erica Wagner said the novel was a “rare thing: a book which, not long after its publication, one can unhesitatingly call a masterpiece.”
Larissa Pham has sold a book to Catapult. How to Run Away will be "about intimacy and art and distances, from the miles that we travel to get away from ourselves to the impossible chasm that can exist between two people sharing a bed."
Elizabeth Bishop’s Key West home has been bought by the Key West Literary Seminar for $1.2 million. The group plans to use the house, where Bishop lived for a decade, as its headquarters.
Splinter staff memorialize the website in a final group post. “No one told us what Splinter had to be or what it couldn’t be. We just decided, every day, what it was,” writes editor in chief Aleksander Chan. “Splinter was a ‘news and politics website’ insomuch that its writers and editors cared about news and politics, and thought they were interesting, or just funny, and wrote about them, and we were lucky enough to work somewhere that fostered that kind of self-determination.”
The New York Times launched a new podcast to cover the House impeachment inquiry. The Latest will release new episodes after each hearing concludes.
For Columbia Journalism Review, Musa al-Gharbi analyzes the New York Times’s coverage of Trump compared to past presidents and presidential candidates. In 2016, Clinton was discussed 34,000 times in the paper, while Trump was mentioned 77,000 times. “In other words, the race was clearly ‘about’ Trump,” he explains. “The 2020 race is shaping up to be more of the same. Although there was a slight drop-off in mentions in 2018, he still remains above his 2016 levels of coverage. No other previous president comes close—nor are any of Trump’s rivals anywhere near him in terms of mentions.”
