Finalists for the National Book Award were announced yesterday. Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land, and Heather Ann Thompson’s Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy are among the shortlisted books. The winner will be announced next month.

Greg Jackson, whose short story collection Prodigals earned him a spot on the US National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” list, talks to The Guardian about the critical reception of his stories, his stylistic influences, and the newfound pressure to write a novel.

Endorsements for Hillary Clinton continue to roll in, the most recent coming from The Atlantic and Vanity Fair. The American Presidency Project’s tally of newspaper endorsements shows that the majority of newspapers have endorsed Clinton—Independent candidate Gary Johnson has three endorsements more than Trump, who has zero. But will this slew of historic endorsements change voters’ minds? At the New York Times, Jim Rutenberg doesn’t think so: “For all the pan-ideological dismay in America’s editorial boardrooms, a huge portion of the country just doesn’t see it the same way at all.”

The Blaze,

Poynter talks to David Fahrenthold, the Washington Post reporter whose articles on Donald Trump’s mishandling of charitable funds resulted in his foundation’s suspension and investigation by the New York attorney general. Fahrenthold credits social media with helping him find some of Trump’s misdeeds: “There was the $10,000 4-foot portrait. I only found out about it because somebody had seen I was writing about it on Twitter.”

Adam Kirsch writes about the revelation that Elena Ferrante is likely the translator Anita Raja, arguing that it makes a good case for cultural appropriation in literature:

Meanwhile, Ferrante’s Neapolitan series will be turned into a play in London next winter.

Bronwen Dickey, the author of the new book Pit Bull, talks to The Rumpus about the racism that drove the anti-pitbull movement. When Dickey asked people about their feelings on the dog breed for her book, the answers she received were often filled with underlying racism. “So many people would say … ‘Those people want them to be macho,’ ‘those people get them and just abandon them,’ ‘those people get them because they want to intimidate other people,’” said Dickey. “The tendency to justify things like bans

In an article published yesterday in the New York Review of Books Daily blog (and simultaneously in publications in Italian, German, and French), the investigative reporter Claudio Gatti states that “after a months-long investigation,” he has uncovered information that strongly suggests the true identity of the mysterious Italian writer Elena Ferrante. “Far from the daughter of a Neapolitan seamstress described in Frantumaglia,” Gatti writes, “new revelations from real estate and financial records point to Anita Raja, a Rome-based translator whose German-born mother fled the Holocaust and later

George R. R. Martin is releasing digitally-enhanced editions of his A Song of Ice and Fire series. A Game of Thrones: Enhanced Edition was released by Apple’s iBooks yesterday on the twentieth anniversary of its publication, and includes “interactive character maps ... detailed annotations, character journeys and timelines, family trees and and audio clips.” The rest of the series will be released over the next few months, and while the first enhanced edition includes an excerpt of the final book in the series, The Winds of Winter, Martin has yet to set a release date.

The National Book

The parents of Trayvon Martin have signed a book deal with Random House’s One World imprint. Rest in Power: The Enduring Life of Trayvon Martin will be published in January. The book was acquired by Chris Jackson, the editor in chief of One World. “Everyone who's been reading the manuscript is in tears by the second chapter,” Jackson told the Hollywood Reporter. “It's not just about the mournful story about losing a child, but it's also how that moment ignited this global movement.”

For the first time in over a century of publishing, The Arizona Republic is backing a Democrat for president.

Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathizer, maps the current fight over cultural appropriation and outlines the myriad ways—acknowledging history, accepting criticism, taking responsibility—that writers can advance the argument over who gets to write about what. “If all of this seems too difficult, then you understand why people would rather fight over things like food, and why building walls may seem easier than building bridges.”

The New Yorker’s David Remnick has written a paean to BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith. Calling the site “an entity that is

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas launched his digital media project EmergingUS on Medium yesterday, aimed at a growing demographic that Vargas identifies as wanting “to see the women of Black Lives Matter next to The Bamboo Ceiling next to White people talking about diversity and inclusivity next to mixed-race people.” Vargas had originally partnered with the Los Angeles Times, but struggled to find a new host for the documentary series after the deal fell through. He hopes the project will change how digital media reports on “issues of identity, race, and immigration.”

The New York Times has endorsed Hillary Clinton for president. The paper cites as evidence both Clinton’s political record and the nature of the 2016 election. “One candidate . . . has a record of service and a raft of pragmatic ideas, and the other, Donald Trump, discloses nothing concrete about himself or his plans while promising the moon and offering the stars on layaway.”

Roger Angell, the author of many books, writes in the New Yorker that he has voted in eighteen presidential elections (he first voted in 1944, for FDR). He then explains why his nineteenth vote, in this November’s

PEN America has released a new report on media censorship in China. The nearly eighty-page report found foreign journalists have had an increasingly difficult time doing their job since president Xi Jinping took office in 2012. The organization points to Chinese citizens’ wariness of being a source for foreign journalists due to increased crackdowns on and arrests of activists, writers, and others who question the party. Journalists have also found it more difficult to apply for and receive work visas, and foreign news outlets have shied away from publishing critical articles on their

Maggie Nelson and Claudia Rankine have been awarded MacArthur Fellowships, also known as "Genius Grants." Robert Caro, author of The Power Broker and an epic multivolume biography of Lyndon Johnson, will receive the National Book Award medal for lifetime achievement.

Gizmodo Media group—the company formerly known as Gawker Media—has named Raju Narisetti as its new CEO. Narisetti, who is currently a senior vice-president at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., will begin his new gig in October.

Publishers Weekly reports some bleak book-sales numbers: The first quarter of 2016 saw a 10 percent drop in