The National Book Foundation has announced the winners of its annual 5 Under 35 program. This year’s honorees are Yelena Akhtiorskaya, nominated for her debut novel, Panic in a Suitcase; Alex Gilvarry, the author of From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant, also his first novel; Phil Klay, for his book of short stories, Redeployment; Valeria Luiselli for her novel, Faces in the Crowd, translated from its original Spanish; and Kirstin Valdez Quade, for her debut short-story collection Night at the Fiestas. The winners will be celebrated at a party on November 17 at powerHouse Arena in Brooklyn.
At the New York Times, Ravi Somaiya identifies a change in New Yorker cover art over the years “toward the topical and provocative.” Editor in chief David Remnick says the shift began in the wake of the September 11 attacks, when the magazine ran a now-famous cover by Art Spiegelman that depicted the Twin Towers as black shadows against a dark background. This week’s New Yorker cover is not at all topical, but it is a product of the moment: For the first time, the cover’s online version is a GIF.
USA Today reports that some at ESPN consider Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight website a “disaster” due to lack of revenue, traffic, and advertising.
Literary agent Andrew Wylie is gathering his high-profile clients—among them Philip Roth, Elif Batuman, and Salman Rushdie—to band together against Amazon’s domineering practices under the group Authors United. Wylie told the Times, “If Amazon is not stopped, we are facing the end of literary culture in America.”
Feminist humor website The Toast, co-founded by Mallory Ortberg and Nicole Cliffe, has hired Roxane Gay to head its new vertical, The Butter—later to be spun off as its own website. Gay will have complete editorial control over the site, which will focus on cultural criticism. "It was gonna be The Butter or The Jelly,” Gay said, “but butter seems sexier."
