Anton Chekhov Judy Blume and Lena Dunham trade notes on reading for a new, pocket-sized volume published by The Believer. If you’ve already faltered on your New Year’s resolutions, Brendan Mathews suggests reading Chekhov for a better 2014, albeit with a few caveats: “Before embarking on a self-help tour of late-Czarist Russia, be advised that Chekhov doesn’t provide easy answers to becoming a kinder, more caring person,” he writes, in an essay for the Millions. “There’s no five-step solution, no short prayer that will increase your fortunes and lay waste to the fields of your enemies…. Chekhov doesn’t make

Pussy Riot’s Maria Alyokhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, and Yekaterina Samutsevich At the LA Times, Sara Marcus reviews Masha Gessen’s new book, Words Will Break Cement, about the musicians, activist, and feminists who make up the Russian punk rock band Pussy Riot: “Gessen is not just asking how these women came to form Pussy Riot, or how they came to be punished so severely for making protest art. She’s also asking what makes great political art, and proposing that art and truth-telling have the power to defeat oppressive regimes.” The Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, has added another major acquisition

Anthony Marra Anthony Marra, author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, has won the first-ever John Leonard Prize, the National Book Critics Circle announced yesterday. Marra’s novel, set in war-torn Chechnya, was singled out for the new award, created this year to honor a debut work in any genre. The organization also named thirty finalists in six additional categories, from criticism to fiction. Among the contenders are Alexander Hemon, Rebecca Solnit, Jesmyn Ward, Hilton Als, Jonathan Franzen, Janet Malcolm, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Javier Marías, Donna Tartt, George Packer, and Lawrence Wright. The awards ceremony will be held on March

Antonio Lobo Antunes The Portuguese novelist Antonio Lobo Antunes, the Palestinian writer Suad Amiry, the Italian psychiatrist Guiseppe dell’Acqua, and the French philosophy Michel Serres are the winners of Italy’s thirty-ninth annual Nonino Prizes. V. S. Naipaul presided over this year’s jury, which included Peter Brook, John Banville, and the Syrian poet Adonis, among others. Roger Ailes once said to his client, Senator Al D’Amato: “Jesus, nobody likes you. Your own mother wouldn’t vote for you. Do you even have a mother?” The New Republic highlights Roger Ailes’s most outrageous comments from Off Camera, the new biography of the

Amiri Baraka The provocative, award-winning poet, playwright, and political activist Amiri Baraka has died. Born Everett LeRoi Jones in 1934, he grew up in New Jersey and later became the state’s second poet laureate. In his long and eventful life, he was associated with the Beats and the Black Arts Movement, though he eventually broke with them both. He wrote beautifully about the blues and jazz and caused considerable controversy with his poem about 9/11, titled “Somebody Blew Up America.” He was 79 and had recently been suffering from an unknown illness. Is crowd-testing fiction on the agenda for

Christopher Isherwood and Dan Bachardy, circa 1976 The New York Times’s redesign, unveiled yesterday, has lots of white space, minimal clutter, and embedded multimedia and comments. The Times also now features sponsored articles (“advertorials”), which are conspicuously marked (the public editor has posted info about how these “native ads” work). Behind the scenes, the new site has an advanced analytics system, which will track and tag data about readers, and Times’s web designers are said to be monitoring users’ reaction to the site and making adjustments. A new book of love letters by Christopher Isherwood and his boyfriend Dan

Amelia Gray When a reader wrote to Amelia Gray to complain that nothing happened in her novel Threats, she wrote back with spy-worthy instructions, a story, and a check. The category winners of the Costa Book Awards have been announced, and the winners include Kate Atkinson (for Life After Life), Nathan Filer (for The Shock of the Fall), and Lucy Hughes-Hallet (for her biography of Gabriele D’Annunizo). All of these authors are now in the running for the grand prize, which will be announced on January 28. “The things that the tech boom’s golden boys said last year,” writes

Jorge Luis Borges As a boy, Jorge Luis Borges carried a small dagger, a gift from his father, who told him to use it against his bullies to prove he was a man. For years thereafter, writes Michael Greeenberg in the New York Review of Books, Borges “prowled the obscure barrios of Buenos Aires, seeking the company of cuchilleros, knife fighters, who represented to him a form of authentic criollo nativism that he wished to know and absorb.” Can anyone step up to compete with Amazon? Two contenders have just consolidated, as Zola, an independent website, buys Bookish, an online

Morrissey Morrissey is at work on a novel and a new album (in that order). In a recent interview, Moz says he’s lost faith in pop music and wants to write instead, claiming that his memoir, Autobiography, “was more successful than any record I’ve ever released.” Researchers at Emory University have discovered that reading novels exercises the brain. “We already knew that good stories can put you in someone else’s shoes in a figurative sense,” says neuroscientist Gregory Berns. “Now we’re seeing that something may also be happening biologically.” At the Times, OR books publisher Colin Robinson weighs in

Edwidge Danticat The lawyer who outed J.K. Rowling as the author of detective novel published under a pseudonym last year has been fined in the UK for breaking client confidentiality rules. Rowling wrote The Cuckoo’s Calling under the name Robert Galbraith in April 2013. The lawyer, Chris Gossage, told his wife, who told a friend, who in turn told a newspaper columnist. The villa in Egypt’s second largest city, where Lawrence Durrell lived and was inspired to write “The Alexandria Quartet,” is slated for demolition, reports The Guardian. “If bulldozed, Durrell’s crumbling former home would become the 36th listed

Ralph Ellison Shall we begin? The Guardian’s guide to the coming year runs through the likely literary landmarks of 2014: Hanif Kureishi on a fading writer being vexed by his young biographer, Alain de Botton on the news, Masha Gessen on the passion of Pussy Riot, retracing E.M. Forster’s travels in India, the third and final installment in Karl Ove Knausgård’s autobiographical trilogy, Ralph Ellison’s centenary, and more. Danielle Steel has been awarded the French Legion of Honor, making her the latest American to win France’s most prestigious prize. Steel, a writer of thrillers who is considered the bestselling

Margaret Mitchell As Al Jazeera demands the release of its four journalists detained in Egypt, the Committee to Protect Journalists has released a grim accounting of the year, declaring Egypt, Syria, and Iraq the most deadly nations in the world for the press. According to the report, seventy journalists have been killed for their work in 2013. Twenty-five more deaths are still under investigation. “The Great American Novel—always capitalized, like the United States of America itself—has to be a book that contains and explains the whole country,” writes Adam Kirsch in a review of Lawrence Buell’s The Dream of the

Jeff Bezos Washington Post publisher Katherine Weymouth talks about the paper and its new owner, Jeff Bezos: “People have stopped wearing ties, that’s the biggest change around here” since Bezos bought the paper for $250 million last fall. The D.C. daily is in a “great position,” she says. “We have a credible brand, deeply engaged readers, [and we] cover Washington. And now we are owned by someone with deep pockets who cares what we do and is willing to invest for the long term.” For its end-of-the-year roundup, Salon asked critics to name their favorite books—and their least-likable characters.

Lila Abu-Lughod As an alternative to the Queen’s annual Christmas missive, the UK’s Channel 4 aired a message from surveillance whistleblower and former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, warning of the dangers of a future without privacy—a future, he says, which will look and feel a lot worse than George Orwell’s 1984. On the New York Times’ Arts Beat blog, anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod talks about her new book, Do Muslim Women Need Saving, inspired by the (craven, spurious, cynical) argument that the US went to war in Afghanistan to free women from the Taliban and liberate them from their burqas

Mikhail Kalashnikov For six years, the New York Times not only held the story of Robert Levinson, an American spy on a CIA mission who went missing in Iran in 2007, but also repeatedly described Levinson’s visit to the country in a manner which the paper’s editorial writers and news reporters knew to be false. Public editor Margaret Sullivan weighs in on the reasons why. Mikhail Kalashnikov, inventor of the AK-47, has died. Read more about him here: “In the final days of the Soviet Union, when the old icons were fast decaying and any future ones were frantically

Boris Akunin The New York Times Magazine will take a bit longer before deciding who the new editor, replacing Hugo Lindgren, will be. Times executive editor Jill Abramson sent a memo to staff on Friday saying there were “urgent issues and questions” to consider before the new appointment, and has named a committee to “plunge into the challenges facing the magazine.” Russian President Vladimir Putin has created a new writers’ club, the Literary Assembly, which will hold its first congress in the spring of 2014, ahead of 2015 being designated a “Year of Literature” in Russia. “The Kremlin intends

Donna Tartt With eleven days left in the year, the New York Times’ book critics Michiko Kakutani, Janet Maslin, and Dwight Gardner have weighed in with their lists of favorite books from 2013, including Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, Edwidge Danticat’s Claire of the Sea Light, George Saunders’s Tenth of December, Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers, and Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped. In New England, a vendue is an auction. In the south, a mourner’s bench is a pew set aside for penitents in the front of a church. In the northwest, to hooky bob is to hold onto the back

Eliot Higgins Eliot Higgins, the blogger best known as Brown Moses, is launching a new web site in early 2014, devoted to his specific and resourceful brand of investigative journalism, which relies heavily on public data, social media, user-generated content, and open-source technology. Higgins has been tracking the Syrian civil war since 2012, with an eye toward munitions and the movement of weapons. The new, as-yet-unnamed web site, however, is set to pursue a broader mission, melding classical reporting skills with the most up-to-date fact-finding tools: “I don’t want it to be old journalism vs new journalism,” Higgins says.

Samuel Beckett Only around five recordings of Samuel Beckett’s voice are known to exist. This forthcoming documentary—about the making of Beckett’s first and only feature film, starring Buston Keaton and usefully titled Film—includes one of them. Directed by Ross Lipman, a filmmaker and restoration specialist, the documentary, cleverly titled NotFilm, features a wealth of archival material, including photographs from location scouts, film footage, and rare bits of dialogue between Beckett and the director Alan Schneider. Quercus, publisher of the late Stieg Larsson’s astronomically bestselling Millenium trilogy, has announced plans to continue to the series. Apparently, Larsson had mapped out

Cover designed by Sulki Min \ When Lolita was first published by an obscure French publisher of erotica in 1955, it came packaged in a plain green wrapper. Since then, the book’s had many evocative covers, most of which ignore Nabokov’s ardent art direction: “No girls.” There’ve been knocked-kneed legs in schoolgirl skirts, lollipop-licking seductresses, and button-nosed cuties smiling wanly. In Lolita: The Story of a Cover Girl editors John Bertram and Yuri Leving examine the ways in which Nabokov’s most famous book has been portrayed, and commission new takes on the book’s cover from eighty artists and designers, along with