The recipients of this year’s Windham Campbell Prizes were announced yesterday. Winners include Yiyun Li, Namwali Serpell, and Anne Boyer.
Lucie Elven has sold a new book to Soft Skull. The Weak Spot “follows an unnamed narrator’s arrival in a remote European town to apprentice under the enigmatic man who runs the town’s pharmacy, and examines ideas about narrative, language, power, prescriptions, cures, and women’s bodies.”
For The Ringer, Jane Hu explains why Ling Ma’s 2018 novel Severance speaks to our current moment.
NiemanLab looks at how coronavirus and social distancing is affecting alt-weeklies across the country. “This has, without a doubt, been the single worst week in the history of America’s alternative press,” Joshua Benton writes. “They’re facing a double blow: Not only have their main advertising sources dried up, so have their main points of distribution.”
At the London Review of Books, Thomas Jones reflects on life under quarantine in Italy and how the situation has changed in the last two weeks. “This issue of the LRB goes to press on Thursday, 19 March, halfway through Lent and 10 days since Italy closed its schools,” he writes. “The date on this issue is 2 April, two weeks from now. The day after that, in theory, schools in Italy are set to reopen. But everyone knows that won’t happen.”
The Guardian reports on “the pandemic news we have all been needing: George RR Martin is using his hours of confinement to work on his long-awaited Game of Thrones novel, The Winds of Winter.”
On Sunday afternoon, Triangle House is hosting Homebound, an online lecture series featuring Alexandra Chang, Hilary Leichter, Miranda Popkey, and more.
