Twenty years after the arrest of the Unabomber, novelist William T. Vollmann recalls just how baffled the FBI was in its search for the Ted Kaczynski, the man who mailed a number of bombs in an attempt to advance his antigovernment and antitechnology worldview. Vollmann should know a thing or two about the FBI’s fumbling for answers: the novelist himself was for a time considered a suspect.

Kevin Young, whose Blue Laws: Selected and Uncollected Poems was just released, discusses his writing process (he works from 10am until 4pm, “once Judge Judy comes on”) and gives a sneak peak into his

Imre Kertész, the Nobel-winning novelist and survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, has died. His 2013 Paris Review interview might be as fitting an obituary as any: “I am somebody who survived all of it, somebody who saw the Gorgon’s head and still retained enough strength to finish a work that reaches out to people in a language that is humane.”

As AWP begins, the novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen expresses mixed feelings about the need, every now and then, for writers to crawl out of their caves and join the rest of the tribe.

Padma Lakshmi, whose new memoir partly concerns her marriage to Salman

Today is the final, championship round of the Morning News Tournament of Books. Novelist Celeste Ng let Paul Beatty’s The Sellout through yesterday over its competitor, President Obama’s favorite, Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff: “Both books have the same effect of shaking the ground under the reader’s feet,” Ng noted. “The Sellout does it through satire: When everyone’s a target, no one has the moral high ground. Fates and Furies uses plot twists.” So Beatty’s book will now be duking it out against Angela Flournoy’s The Turner House.

This week, VIDA released the results of its annual byline

The novelist Marilynne Robinson has received a lifetime achievement award from the Library of Congress. The prize, which honors writers who express “something new about the American experience,” has previously been given to Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, and Philip Roth.

Stephen Glass, the former journalist caught fabricating multiple stories in the 1990s, now claims to have repaid with interest the publications he wrote for, including the New Republic, Harper’s, and Rolling Stone, to the tune of $200,000.

Things to look forward to in the near future include Rivka Galchen’s piece on Hillary

The Guardian has hired former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson (who’s postponed her plans to run a subscription-based longform journalism project producing “one perfect whale of a story” per month) as a biweekly columnist on the presidential race. She’s started with a piece in defense of Hillary Clinton’s probity, even though, she notes, “As a reporter my stories stretch back to Whitewater. I’m not a favorite in Hillaryland.”

Jezebel deputy editor Jia Tolentino has a piece about Thomas Sayers Ellis, a visiting professor at the Iowa Writers Workshop who was removed from his post

Jim Harrison—the author of twenty-one works of fiction, as well as screenplays and books of poetry—died on Saturday at age seventy-eight. He was perhaps best known as the author of Legends of the Fall (1979), which was adapted into a movie, and for his notorious appetites. The Times obituary takes note of his penchant for guns (shooting rattlesnakes in his yard), company (he hung out with Jack Nicholson, John Huston, Bill Murray, et. al), alcohol, and food (he once ate 144 oysters in a single sitting).

Sources say that Gawker paid the Conde Nast executive who was outed on the site last summer

After all the upheaval of abandoning nudity, it looks as if Playboy may be going up for sale soon.

Fortune has published a very affectionate profile of Jeff Bezos, who nowadays has, it asserts, “every reason to cha-cha.” It does also note that “the possibilities of a less tethered Jeff Bezos are equal parts exciting (imagine what he’ll do) and terrifying (pity whom he’ll crush).” The one really endearing detail the piece includes, however, is an account of one of Bezos’s less successful innovations, “disemvoweling,” a feature he attempted to introduce to the Washington Post which would have

The winners of this year’s Whiting Awards for emerging writers were announced this week: You can read extracts from their work at The Paris Review’s website, or you can hear them read in person tonight, at BookCourt. (The Whiting Foundation is also offering a substantial new grant to help writers of creative nonfiction complete their books—applications are open now.)

Maggie Doherty’s New Republic piece on Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (reissued this month by Columbia University Press) begins with the author vomiting all over a Persian rug she’d just bought in a fit of “libertine glory” after

Roxane Gay’s novel, An Untamed State, about a woman who is abducted in Haiti, is to be adapted for the screen by Fox Searchlight, and Gay has signed on to co-write the script.

After nearly ten years of offering his New York Times colleagues regular critiques of their writing and editing, Philip B. Corbett announces in his latest After Deadline post that there will be no more “for the time being.” So if we want to take note of the Times’s use of “sprung” for “sprang,” or its description of Donald Trump “grabbing his podium with both hands” (lectern would have been more accurate), we’ll have to

Efforts to make the writing life look more action-packed than it really is are not new, but that shouldn’t prevent anyone from enjoying the trailer for Papa: Hemingway in Cuba, which, incidentally, is being billed as the first American film to be shot in Cuba since the revolution.

Gawker, after being ordered last week to pay Hulk Hogan $115 million—considerably more than the media company is worth—asked for mercy and got hit with an extra $25 million in punitive damages instead.

Jim Rutenberg, the New York Times’s new media columnist, stepping into the formidable shoes of the late David Carr

On Friday night in New York’s meatpacking district, Prince announced that he is writing a memoir. “The good people of Random House have made me an offer I can’t refuse!” said the musician. The book, titled The Beautiful Ones, will be published by Random House imprint Spiegel & Grau in fall 2017. Dan Piepenbring, the web editor of the Paris Review, will cowrite. “He’s a good critic,” Prince said. “That’s what I need. Not a yes man."

The winners of the National Book Critics Circle Awards, which were announced on Thursday last week, have listed some of their biggest influences. The Argonauts

The winners of the National Book Critics Circle Awards, announced last night, include Paul Beatty (for fiction), Maggie Nelson (for criticism), Ross Gay (for poetry), and Margo Jefferson (for autobiography).

At The Baffler, Chris Lehmann paints a vivid picture of the Breitbart media operation and its workings.

William Brennan has a piece on Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Irish Gaelic masterpiece, Cré na Cille, written in the 1940s and only now available in English translation (two translations, in fact, with two different titles: The Dirty Dust and Graveyard Clay). Ó Cadhain’s novel, his debut, was