• David Carr
    September 18, 2017

    NBC Says It Will Launch a New Hub Dedicated to Media Coverage

    NBC plans to create a new hub dedicated to the coverage of the media industry, and has hired Claire Atkinson, the former media reporter for the New York Post, to head the project. Other new hires include former Buzzfeed news editor Ben Smith and Recode editor Kara Swisher.

    David Carr, who died in 2015, was known as many things—recovering addict, media columnist for the Times, author of the bestselling memoir The Night of the Gun. He was also a tough and generous mentor to many younger writers. Now, at The Atlantic, more than a dozen authors remember the role Carr played in their careers. Says

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  • Junot Diaz
    September 15, 2017

    National Book Award nonfiction longlist announced; Junot Diaz and radical hope

    The nominees for the 2017 National Book Award in nonfiction have been announced, and include Kevin Young’s Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News, David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the F.B.I., Masha Gessen’s The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, and James Forman Jr.’s Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America. The longlist for fiction will be announced later today.

    New York Times reporter Mike Isaac is writing a book about Uber, which will be published in 2019 by Norton.

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  • Curtis Sittenfeld
    September 14, 2017

    Man Booker Prize shortlist announced; Hillary Clinton's book tour

    The shortlist for the 2017 Man Booker Prize has been announced. Not everyone is happy with it. At the Washington Post, Ron Charles thinks the list is “too American.” And at The Guardian, Claire Hynes wonders: “How many Man Bookers must writers of colour win before they’re accepted?”

    Are Democrats nervous about Hillary Clinton’s widely publicized book tour? As some have suggested, What Happened doesn’t skimp on critiques of the party: “In the book, Clinton is less than flattering in her assessment of her primary election opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders. She even complains about decisions her old

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  • Maggie Haberman
    September 13, 2017

    "Cambodia Daily" closes; the Brooklyn Book Fest gets under way

    Thomas Beller, author of J. D. Salinger: The Escape Artist, writes about his experiences working for the Cambodia Daily, and reports on that paper’s abrupt closing following threats from the government last week. “There were many news items about the threat to the Daily and the authoritarian turn away from democracy. On Sunday, September 3rd, the leader of the opposition party was arrested in the middle of the night, charged with treason, and taken to a remote prison. The following edition of the paper carried the headline ‘Descent into outright dictatorship,’ above the fold. At the bottom was

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  • Ira Lightman
    September 12, 2017

    Ira Lightman on plagiarists; celebrating fifty issues of "McSweeny's"

    Lani Sarem’s YA novel Handbook for Mortals debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list when it was released in August. Quickly, however, questions were raised about the book’s legitimacy on the list: Did the author, who most people in the YA community had never heard of, somehow game the system? The Times quickly pulled the book from the list. Now, the author is trying to make her side of the story known. “While I am not selling the books through traditional channels established by the book industry,” she writes, “the sales of my book are quite real.”

    According to poet Ira Lightman,

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  • Ian Buruma
    September 11, 2017

    Ian Buruma on taking over the NYRB; Roddy Doyle on writing

    Emily Temple explains why Rebel in the Rye, Danny Strong’s new feature film about J. D. Salinger, is “bad for writers.” “A while ago, I wrote a piece about why every aspiring writer should see Paterson, Jim Jarmusch’s excellent film about a young poet living in Paterson, New Jersey. This movie is the other side of the coin. Writers should not see Rebel in the Rye. I mean, do what you want, but if Paterson was a realistic evocation of the life of a creative person, Rebel in the Rye is the utter opposite. Not only is it filled with platitudes and lame advice, but it’s a sentimental monument to

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  • Roxane Gay. Photo: Jay Grabiec.
    September 08, 2017

    Roxane Gay's advice column; the Wordstock book festival

    Yesterday on Facebook, Roxane Gay announced that she has been hired to write an advice column for the New York Times.

    Bestselling author James Patterson donated $1.75 million to public-school teachers to help improve their classroom libraries.

    The Portland, Oregon, book festival Wordstock has released the lineup of this year’s event, which will take place on November 11. Author who will participate in the festival include Mac Barnett, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Carson Ellis, Jeffrey Eugenides, Adam Gopnik, David Grann, Jenny Han, Daniel Handler, Claire Messud, Tom Perrotta, Danez Smith, Lidia Yuknavitch,

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  • Kate Millett
    September 07, 2017

    Graydon Carter to retire; "New York Times" hires Michelle Goldberg as a columnist

    Graydon Carter has announced that he will end his twenty-five-year run as the editor of Vanity Fair in December. The New York Times notes the significance of the news: “Mr. Carter’s influence and stature in the magazine and entertainment world is so great that to call his exit a changing of the guard seems insufficient: This is more of a regal passage.”

    Kate Millet, the feminist author best known for her 1970 book Sexual Politics, has died.

    The New York Times has hired progressive writer Michelle Goldberg to be a full-time columnist. She is one of three women (out of fourteen total writers)

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  • Vanessa Grigoriadis
    September 06, 2017

    Valeria Luiselli on resisting Trump's DACA order; job cuts at Conde Nast

    In the wake of the president's order to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), it’s worth revisiting Valeria Luiselli’s November 2016 Lit Hub essay about the consequences of ending the program and the options for resistance. Luiselli writes that sustained daily action is the most effective form of protest and underscores the necessity of active resistance: “I don’t think I can bear hearing one more person declaring any variation of ‘Even though I am not a Trump-target, I am still hurt/worried/ashamed/full-of-guilt.’ When anyone in a society is the target of institutionalized violence,

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  • John Ashbery
    September 05, 2017

    Remembering John Ashbery; Salman Rushdie on Trump's America

    Chelsea Manning will headline this year’s New Yorker Festival. Other events at the festival include a discussion between Preet Bharara, the New York federal attorney who was appointed by President Obama and later fired by Trump, and legal writer Jeffrey Toobin.

    Following John Ashbery’s death this weekend, there have been a number of tributes: Paul Muldoon writes about how Ashbery “changed the rules of American poetry”; the New York Times has published an obituary (coauthored by author Dinitia Smith and poetry critic David Orr) and a selection of Ashbery’s poems; and at Rolling Stone, Rob

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  • Jhumpa Lahiri
    September 01, 2017

    Jhumpa Lahiri on writing for herself; Glenn Greenwald on diversity of opinion at the "Times"

    Francesca Pellas talks to Jhumpa Lahiri about language learning, translation, and why it’s never a good idea to write with readers in mind. When Lahiri first started writing in Italian, she says other writers discouraged her from the project, saying that there would be no readers. But Lahiri said she was never worried about whether people needed her book or not. “I think that writing must also be a selfish act,” she said. “A book might reach out to someone else at some point, after years, or maybe never at all, but it is not up to me to write with this idea in mind. Writing is, above all, an

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