paper trail

Rachel Cusk's archive acquired by Harry Ransom Center; Man Booker International Prize shortlist announced

Rachel Cusk. Photo: Jaime Hogge

The shortlist for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize has been announced. Nominees include Jokha Alharthi’s Celestial Bodies, Annie Ernaux’s The Years, and Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, among others. The winner will be announced in May.

The Nation editor and publisher Katrina vanden Huevel will step down in June. Editor-at-large D. D. Guttenplan will replace her. “It’s possible to stay in a job too long,” she told the New York Times in an interview. “It’s a time of tectonic shifts, and a new editor is part of the change that I think is important to continue The Nation’s work as a place of progressive ideals and ideas.”

Rachel Cusk’s archive has been acquired by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin. The Guardian reports that the collection includes notebooks, diaries, Cusk’s old laptop, and her children’s drawings, but “contains none of her draft manuscripts, which she admitted had been used to light fires, drawn on by her children, or lost.”

Poynter adds to the speculation on the possible winners of the 2019 Pulitzer Prizes, which will be announced next Monday.

At Broadly, Marie Solis talks to Natasha Lennard about the media, protest, and her new essay collection, Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life.

“Writing is the place where I have found focus,” Hark author Sam Lipsyte tells Guernica. “It’s so hard to find it anywhere else. It’s often not the case, but when it’s going well—which isn’t always an indicator that the work is good—there is this sense of focus, of being in a kind of clear space.”