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Predicting the Winner of the Fiction Pulitzer; The Baffler Names Its New Editor

Nick Flynn

Last week, Chris Lehmann left The Baffler to become editor of the New Republic. Now, The Baffler has named its new editor in chief: Jonathon Sturgeon, who has been a senior editor at the magazine since 2017. “During The Baffler’s explosive growth since the 2016 election,” says publisher Noah McCormack, “Jonathon has led the way in commissioning the broad range of diverse writers that have gained The Baffler an ever-growing audience.”

This Thursday, Michel Houellebecq, France's “best-known and most provocative novelist,” will receive the Legion of Honour, France's “highest civilian distinction,” from President Emmanuel Macron.

Electric Lit predicts the winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize in fiction. The awards will be announced later today. “I really do think Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers takes it,” writes Bradley Sides, “but the Pulitzer announcement usually comes with some surprises.”

“Maybe I am a bit too militant about detachment, but every time I love a book, my heart breaks for a few weeks, I tell a few people, and then I erase it from my mind. It’s the only way I can move on.” Ottessa Moshfegh dwells on her personal literary canon.

Author and agent Bill Clegg (The Portrait of the Addict as a Young Man) has sold Nick Flynn’s new memoir, Mister Mann, to W.W. Norton’s executive editor Jill Bialosky. Flynn, a poet, is the author of three previous memoirs, including Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. His latest is “an exploration of parenthood and grief, tracing the effects of Flynn’s upbringing by his single mother and her suicide.”

On Friday night, the Los Angeles Festival of Books kicked off by naming the winners of the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, who included Francisco Cantu, Beth Macy, and Rebecca Makkai.