Valeria Luiselli 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 Book Review excerpts Hilary Mantel’s new collection, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, which has generated controversy in England over the title story. Here is Thatcher, seen through the eyes of the story’s would-be assassin: “High heels on the mossy path. Tippy-tap. Toddle on. She’s making efforts, but getting nowhere very fast. The bag on the arm, slung like a shield. The tailored suit just as I have foreseen, the pussycat bow, a long loop of pearls, and—a new touch—big goggle glasses. Shading her, no doubt, from the trials of the afternoon. Hand extended, she is moving along
Edward Champion Yahoo has announced that on December 31 it will close the Yahoo Directory, “once the Google of its time.” Jeff Feuerzeig, the filmmaker who directed The Devil and Daniel Johnston, is planning a documentary about literary hoaxer JT Leroy, aka Terminator, aka Laura Albert. Rumors are now circulating that the film will be aired on AE by Vice Media, and that Feuerzeig has begun interviewing the many writers, artists, and actors who were fooled by Albert’s hoax. This summer, books blogger and author interviewer Edward Champion posted an 11,000-word complaint about Emily Gould and the rise of
Karl Miller Karl Miller, a founding editor of the London Review of Books, has died. He was eighty-three. Johnson edited the LRB for ten years, plus another three with Mary-Kay Wilmers, the current editor. The Guardian calls him the “greatest literary editor of his time, and one of the greatest ever.” At Open Culture, you can watch Allen Ginsberg’s lectures on the literary history of the Beats. Ginsberg delivered the talks for a summer course at the Naropa Institute in 1977. Gawker got its hands on Vice’s style guide. “Avoid corny colloquialisms like bucks, smackers, or samoleons,” the guide instructs. Also: “A handful of websites are actually becoming legitimate, respected
Saul Williams New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet has announced his new masthead. He retired the managing editor position (which he formerly held), and created in its place the position of deputy executive editor, to which he promoted four people—Susan Chira, Janet Elder, Matt Purdy, and Ian Fisher. A Twitter call for words journalists write but people never say produced this list: lambaste, foray, ballyhoo, tout, oust, fornicate, salvo, pontiff, bolster, and opine. A funny assortment, but if we were to reduce written English to words people actually use—or what about the syntax people use?—there wouldn’t be a
Joan Didion The Believer Logger interviews David Bezmozgis, whose female characters, he says—“ex-Soviet or Russian-Jewish women”—are “tougher” and “more pragmatic” than the men “because they are obliged to be. They have all the female responsibilities and all the male responsibilities.” The Los Angeles Register, a daily paper that was launched in April, has stopped publication, the New York Times reports. Aaron Kushner founded the Register with the intention to offer local news and a “very different political perspective”—meaning a conservative one. “On a fiscal basis, we very much believe in free markets and on the personal liberties side,” Kushner said
David Graeber Last week, The Baffler sponsored a debate between David Graeber and Peter Thiel that Thiel’s team called “objectively, a waste of time,” according to the New York Times, which covered the event in Monday’s edition. Baffler editor John Summers was charmed: “I’m thinking we should embrace the tagline for our next event.” Politico reports that the Times is considering a round of buyouts that would cut fifty jobs from the paper. A company spokesperson refused to comment, dismissing the claim as “rumors and speculation.” Further rumor and speculation (via Capital New York) has it that executive editor
Scott Stossel Sarah Kendzior has announced that she is leaving her position as an op-ed columnist at Al Jazeera English, due to what she calls “new rules,” which allow “no room for freedom of thought.” “Writing for AJ English has been great,” she writes. “I will always be grateful to them for running work on poverty, race, and other controversial topics.” You can find an archive of her columns, the most recent of which focused on the murder of Michael Brown and racial discrimination in St. Louis, here. At Neiman Reports, Scott Stossel—author and editor of The Atlantic—talks about
Ariana Reines On Tuesday the Guardian’s weekday paper launched a new longreads section, headed up by Jonathan Shainin, previously at the New Yorker. The “Journal,” as it is called, will include opinion and reviews together with features of three to five thousand words. Among the section’s first pieces is a profile of the Uruguayan president, José Mujica, an adherent of what the writer, Giles Tremlett, calls a “soft, pragmatic socialism.” At the New York Times Magazine, John Jeremiah Sullivan profiles Donald Antrim, whose new collection of stories, The Emerald Light in the Air, just came out. What distinguishes Antrim
Alison Bechdel The MacArthur awards have been announced. Among the writers are Alison Bechdel, author of the illustrated memoirs Fun Home and Are You My Mother?; Samuel D. Hunter, who wrote the play The Whale; and Terrance Hayes, a poet. The 2014 National Book Awards nonfiction longlist names Anand Gopal, Walter Isaacson, Edward O. Wilson, Evan Osnos, and John Lahr, among others. Notably, only one book written by a woman makes the list of ten: Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?. Chast’s nomination is notable for another reason too: This is the first time a cartoonist
Laura Poitras The Nieman Journalism Lab considersn+1’s history, on the occasion of the magazine’s tenth anniversary. n+1 has survived for a decade through a variety of strategies, the editors report, including “a model for parties that we’ve never changed.” Cara Parks joins Modern Farmer as executive editor. Parks has been freelancing since 2013; before that, she worked at the Huffington Post and Foreign Policy. Modern Farmer is based in Hudson, New York; Parks is in the process of moving. Martin Amis’s new novel, Zone of Interest, is a comedy set in a concentration camp in World War II, and, according to
Slavoj Zizek Last week, the New York Times issued a letter claiming that Slavoj Zizek plagiarized himself in his Op-Ed “ISIS Is a True Disgrace to Fundamentalism,” which ran in the paper on September 3. According the the Times retraction, the Op-Ed recycles entire passages from Zizek’s 2008 book Violence. But now it seems the Times has withdrawn the retraction: It’s nowhere to be found on the paper’s website. The dean of the University of California at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism has proposed that students pay $10,250 a year in addition to their annual tuition, which is approximately
Alan Moore Alan Moore, the author of V for Vendetta, has finished a million-word novel. “I’m not averse to some kind of ebook, eventually,” he said. “As long as I get my huge, cripplingly heavy book to put on my shelf and gloat over, I’ll be happy.” Spin Media laid off nineteen employees and ended the print magazine Vibe, which it acquired last year. James Franco’s latest book, Hollywood Dreaming, drops this month. It’s a collection of poems, short stories, and paintings that describe the evolution of his career in Hollywood. Guernica has a new column about politics and
Rahel Aima Hilary Mantel’s novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, both made into plays in London, may come to the New York stage as well. Broadway producers Jeffrey Richards and Jerry Frankel are in talks with producers in London, with plans to mount Wolf Hall: Parts 1 and 2 in the spring. The New Inquiry’s September issue is called “Back to School.” Read the editor’s note here. Rahel Aima has joined TNI as a contributing editor. At the New Yorker’s Page-Turner, Elif Batuman considers the shift, over the past decade, from irony to awkwardness, and decides that all
John Cheever’s house Forbes has compiled a list of the highest-earning writers this year. James Patterson is in first place, earning $90 million. Gillian Flynn, the author of the “literary thriller” Gone Girl, is in 12th place, at $9 million. The shortlist for the Man Booker Prize has been announced, and includes Joshua Ferris, Richard Flanagan, Karen Joy Fowler, Howard Jacobson, Neel Mukherjee, and Ali Smith. A hacker claims to have taken over the email account of Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto, and is promises to release Nakamoto’s “secrets” if someone will pay him 25 bitcoins, or $12,000. A head
Jenny Diski Jenny Diski, one of the London Review of Books’ best critics, has been diagnosed with inoperable cancer. The lovely and devastating first installment of what will be a regular diary about her illness describes the “pre-ordained banality” that comes along with the diagnosis, and the difficulty of writing about a subject whose outlines are so oppressively familiar. “I can’t avoid the cancer clichés simply by rejecting them,” she realizes. “Rejection is conditioned by and reinforces the existence of the thing I want to avoid. I choose how to respond and behave, but a choice between doing this or
Margaret Atwood Benny Johnson, the Buzzfeed staffer who was fired for plagiarism this summer, has been hired as a social media director at the National Review. At the New York Review of Books blog, Masha Gessen has posted an interesting essay about Russia’s recent population dip. In the past two decades, the number of people has fallen by almost seven million people (5 percent). The main cause is lower life expectancy. But why are Russians dying at an earlier age now than they were during Soviet rule? Is it violence, vodka, “lack of hope”? Poynter points out an error
Teju Cole Teju Cole, the author of Open City and a 4,000-word essay about immigration (composed entirely of Tweets), talks with Foreign Policy magazine about US drone policy, Nigerian corruption, and “hashtag activism.” Vice Media, which has announced that AE networks has invested $250 million in the company, has announced another $250 million investment, this one from a venture capital firm called Technology Crossover Ventures. The New Republic celebrates its centennial this fall, with a gala, an anthology, and a special issue; the publication’s website is also featuring one-hundred notable articles from its history. The Paris Review considers the wit, wisdom,
Chris Kraus USA Today has laid off between 60 and 70 staffers—about half of them editors and writers, according to Jim Romenesko. “Today is my last day at USA TODAY, after 30 years,” Edna Gundersen, the paper’s longtime pop critic, tweeted yesterday. “I was laid off this morning, along with several great colleagues. Onward.” David Remnick has responded to environmental activist Vandana Shiva, who recently fired off a harsh rebuttal to Michael Specter’s profile of her in the August 18 New Yorker. “Part of the problem is that after encouraging Mr. Specter to travel with you both in Italy