Toni Morrison BuzzFeed News has added two new reporters: the Financial Times’ Borzou Daragahi (as a Middle East correspondent) and the Washington Post’s Anup Kaphle (covering world news). Additionally, their current Middle East correspondent, Sheera Frenkel, will begin covering cybersecurity. Meanwhile, as Gawker grilled Buzzfeed’s editor-in-chief and its CEO on the “church and state” deletion of posts about their advertisers, they seemed keen to measure up as a new paper of record. Wouldn’t the New York Times think twice about reporting on its own ads, Jonah Peretti wondered? And Ben Smith called it “both scary and flattering that we

Stephen Elliott Turns out there was backstage drama at the Pulitzers this year. The WSJ reports that the board expressed “some worry” about the three fiction finalists being considered, and requested an extra submission from the jury to avoid a flashback to 2012, when nobody won. At Vulture, Stephen Elliott notes that he is grateful director Pamela Romanowsky adapted his memoir, The Adderall Diaries, for the screen. But the author’s gratitude became mixed with disappointment when he went to see the film, which stars James Franco. “What I saw was a very different Stephen Elliott than the person I

Tin House’s winning tote The Washington Post‘s Tehran correspondent Jason Rezaian, who’s been in prison in Iran since July, is now facing formal charges, including espionage. Pulitzers were just announced—winners include Elizabeth Kolbert for The Sixth Extinction and Anthony Doerr for All the Light We Cannot See. Michael Eric Dyson has attempted a demolition job on Cornel West in the New Republic, presenting West’s criticisms of the Obama presidency as the whining of a “spurned” and “embittered” political lover who “should have understood that Obama had had similar trysts with many others.” West’s intellectual trajectory, Dyson writes, has been

The Pulitzer Prizes awards will be announced today, starting at 3pm. You can watch the announcements live Meanwhile, Buzzfeed gives an exclusive sneak peak of the cover of Salman Rushdie’s forthcoming novel, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, which will be published by Random House in September. The Los Angeles Times has named the winners of its annual book prizes. Jennifer Weiner, the bestselling author who is also known for her feuds with Jonathan Franzen, has announced the publication of her new novel, Who Do You Love, which will go on sale August 11.

Rebecca Solnit Editorial staffers at Gawker Media are trying to unionize: “The online media industry makes real money. It’s now possible to find a career in this industry, rather than just a fleeting job. An organized work force is part of growing up.” Asked for a response by Capital, Gawker owner and CEO Nick Denton was “intensely relaxed”. Simon Schuster has signed a deal with the digital-media streaming company Playster, which offers subscribers access to books, games, movies and music. The agreement will give Playster unlimited access to some of the publisher’s backlist, including The Great Gatsby and The

The Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu The EU accuses Google of breaking antitrust laws by abusing its enviable position atop the internet. But some say that by vanquishing one monster, you may help create more. Is sweetness and light emerging as some sort of publishing micro-trend? First David Brooks lets us all in on the secret that “the résumé virtues” are less important than “the eulogy virtues”, like bravery, kindness, and so on (better to look good at your own funeral than at work); and now the Bookseller reports that the Dalai Lama is collaborating with Desmond Tutu on The

HarperCollins has agreed to terms with Amazon on a new e-book deal, dispelling a rumor that the publisher was refusing to sign the contract. Like other major publishers, HarperCollins will set their own e-book prices, with Amazon appending a passive-aggressive note to the listing. Rights to Harper Lee’s new book, Go Set a Watchman, have been sold in twenty-five countries so far, but foreign publishers must contend with strict security to get a look at the book. Lee’s agent, Andrew Nurnberg, is asking these publishers to travel to his London office and read the manuscript, saying, “We don’t wish

Günter Grass At the New Yorker’s Page Turner blog, Salman Rushdie says goodbye to Günter Grass, who died yesterday. In 1982, after making his “genuflections” before the great man in a village near Hamburg, Rushdie recalls getting drunk on schnapps with Grass and then singing his praises to the German press—”they would have preferred something cattier, but I had nothing catty to say,” Rushdie reports. And he still doesn’t: regardless of Grass’s war record, Rushdie defends him as the author of “the greatest anti-Nazi masterpieces ever written, containing passages about Germans’ chosen blindness towards the Holocaust that no anti-Semite could

Zainub Priya Dala South African psychologist and novelist Zainub Priya Dala (ZP Dala) has been violently attacked, and is now being held in a mental institution—punishment, many allege, for a recent speech in which she praised Salman Rushdie. PEN America is demanding her immediate release. Vice has posted an excerpt from Farrar, Straus and Giroux publisher Jonathan Galassi’s forthcoming novel, Muse. The excerpt is, among other things, a portrait of the aggressive deal-making that takes place at the Frankfurt Book Fair, where Galassi’s novel was bought by Knopf in 2013. “Rights directors were the most visible players under the

Jeffery Renard Allen The 2015 Guggenheim Fellows have been announced; winners include Jeffery Renard Allen, Meghan Daum, Alex Ross, Cathy Park Hong, Percival Everett, Rivka Galchen, and Kevin Powers. At the New Yorker’s Page Turner blog, Leslie Jamison considers Chris Kraus’s work and how Kraus has resisted the idea that her novels are confessional (Kraus’s 2006 novel Torpor was reissued by Semiotext(e) earlier this year). Jamison quotes Kraus saying that she wants to address vulnerability “at some remove,” and looks at the ways in which Kraus’s genre-resistant writings use scenes from her real life as a way to seek

Toni Morrison WAM asks: “Are white writers published in gross disproportion to writers of color?” Two questions that might seem to answer each other. An exciting new episode of the New Yorker’s Comma Queen series, starring the magazine resident grammar goddess Mary Norris, has been posted online.

John Freeman Today is the official launch date of Literary Hub, “a new home for book lovers” that is supported by more than 125 industry partners. “Each day the site—led by editor in chief Jonny Diamond and executive editor John Freeman—will have a main feature from a partner, an exclusive book excerpt, and original content,” says the press release. Because it’s a books site supported by publishers, we will be interested to see if coverage will be uniformly positive, a la Buzzfeed and The Believer. Beirut-based Kaelen Wilson-Goldie has written a deeply thoughtful and eloquent article about the Charlie

Jacques Derrida The Columbia Graduate School of Journalism’s report on the discredited Rolling Stone story, “A Rape on Campus,” concludes that the piece’s mistakes were systemic and could have been avoided, noting “the failure encompassed reporting, editing, editorial supervision and fact-checking.” Rolling Stone has retracted the article and replaced it with the Columbia report, calling it “an anatomy of journalistic failure,” while Gawker says the problem was “pathological conflict-avoidance.” At The Guardian, Jessica Valenti writes that the magazine’s response to the crisis will cause more harm, as the staff tries to shift the blame to Jackie, the story’s subject:

Amber Tamblyn It’s been ten years since Judith Miller left the New York Times, after her reports that Saddam Hussein had built or acquired weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were discredited. On Friday, in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, she sought to correct what she calls “false narratives” about her Iraq coverage. “The newsworthy claims of some of my prewar WMD stories were wrong,” Miller wrote. “But so is the enduring, pernicious accusation that the Bush administration fabricated WMD intelligence to take the country to war.” The timing of this article is probably no coincidence: Miller’s new

Saeed Jones BuzzFeed is starting a fellowship for young writers. The site’s new literary editor, poet Saeed Jones, is also planning what he calls a whole “literary movement” that involves a magazine, readings, and a salon series. Jones says, “I think it’s fair to say there were a few skeptics initially about the idea of book culture and BuzzFeed culture coming together, but it totally works. I’m excited to push us even further and publish new fiction, poems and lyric essays by writers we adore.” At Publishers Weekly, some reactions to this week’s Business Insider story about the breakdown in

Ellis Jones Alan Rusbridger will leave his position as the editor in chief of The Guardian this summer, but before he goes, he plans to run an “unprecedented,” six-month series of articles about climate change. Working with the environmental activist organization 350.org, Rusbridger will conclude with a campaign called “Keep it in the Ground,” which will, among other things, call for the Bill and Melinda Gates’ Foundation and the Wellcome Trust to cut their ties with fossil-fuel companies. The Guardian Media Group announced today that it is selling off all of its fossil-fuel assets, making the company’s investment fund the

Emily St. John Mandel The New York Times will provide headlines and short article summaries—with emojis—to the Apple Watch. Emily St. John Mandel’s novel Station Eleven has defeated Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See in the Morning News’s Tournament of Books final. One of the judges, Victor Lavalle, says of the two books: “Both risk looking foolishly hopeful, about love or art, and they’re infinitely better for it. It was, finally, a question of scale that solidified my decision. Somehow a small slice of the apocalypse left me feeling fuller than a large serving of a world

Lawrence Wright The New York Review has reprinted some of Hilary Mantel’s written advice to actors who are performing the stage adaptation of her historical novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. To Cardinal Archbishop Thomas Wolsey, she states: “You are, arguably, Europe’s greatest statesman and greatest fraud.” Ben S. Bernanke, the former Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, has started a new economics blog at the Brookings Institute’s website. Inaugural post: “Why are interests rates so low?” This June, a collection of early Elmore Leonard stories will be posthumously published. Last night, HBO aired their documentary expose

Nicole Krauss Nicole Krauss (The History of Love) has reportedly sold her next two books for $4 million to Harper, making a departure from her previous publisher, Norton. The first of these two books, Late Wonder, is described rather abstractly as “a searching and metaphysical novel about transformation, about moving in the opposite direction from all that is known and apparent.” The second title, How to Be a Man, is a book of stories. A sneak peak at the cover of Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Purity, which, as some have pointed out, features an image that bears resemblance to

Renata Adler In The Baffler, Evgeny Morozov writes about the problems of technology criticism (he thinks it is willfully oblivious to political and social realities), and explains why he’s decided to abandon the profession: “For a long time, I’ve considered myself a technology critic. Thus, I must acknowledge defeat as well: contemporary technology criticism in America is an empty, vain, and inevitably conservative undertaking. At best, we are just making careers; at worst, we are just useful idiots.” At his blog, tech critic Nicholas Carr answers Morozov’s critique: “Morozov has come to believe that the only valid technology criticism