The writer-director Michael Mann is launching a publishing imprint, Michael Mann Books, in order to work with a stable of authors (who’ll sometimes share the cover credit with him) on fiction and nonfiction books that he’ll also develop for film and television.

The New Yorker is previewing its new podcast, The Author’s Voice, in which, as of next week, you’ll be able to hear writers reading their own stories from the magazine. They’re pulling out all the stops for this first sample episode, which boasts Zadie Smith doing an American accent (or several) as she reads “Escape from New York,” her

After last night’s results, John Cassidy considers the prospect of a fight for the presidency between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

Novelist and art historian Anita Brookner, who won the Booker Prize in 1984 for Hotel du Lac, has died. The novelist Hilary Mantel has written that “Brookner is the sort of artist described as minor by people who read her books only once,” whereas, in Mantel’s view, the “singular quality of each, as well as the integrity of the project, is established.” Brookner told The Paris Review, of her autobiographical first novel, A Start in Life, published when she

A somewhat chilling article in the New York Times describes a firm called Jellybooks and its founder, who hopes to use data to transform book publishing, Moneyball-style. The company is working with publishers to examine in detail how people actually read their ebooks: “On average, fewer than half of the books tested were finished by a majority of readers. Most readers typically give up on a book in the early chapters. Women tend to quit after 50 to 100 pages, men after 30 to 50. Only 5 percent of the books Jellybooks tested were completed by more than 75 percent of readers.” And, it turns out,

In an article published in Milan’s Corriere della Sera, the Italian writer and professor Marco Santagata claims that he has determined the true identity of Elena Ferrante. He writes that Ferrante is the pen name of Marcella Marmo, a professor at a Neapolitan university. According to Slate, Marmo has denied Santagata’s claim, and has pointed out that she is too “timid and reserved” to be such an bold writer. Ferrante’s Italian publisher has also denied that Marmo is Ferrante.

Harper Lee’s estate will no longer allow the printing of inexpensive, mass-market editions of To Kill a Mockingbird.

The novelist Marilynne Robinson has her say on that “great orange-haired Unintended Consequence,” the nonfictional Donald Trump: He is “alarming as well as absurd, stirring and stoking the worst impulses in the electorate. But then this is only a darkening of the atmosphere we have lived in since Nixon, as fear and resentment began to be commodified very profitably by the likes of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.”

As the thaw between the US and Cuba continues, Publishers Weekly has called for an end to the embargo on books: “the Cuban people have not been able to read American authors for more than

Insights yielded in the ongoing trial over Gawker’s publication of a Hulk Hogan sex tape this week include the following: jokes between colleagues don’t hold up that well when explained on the stand several years later; Gawker isn’t too concerned with anyone’s privacy; the rest of America isn’t too concerned with Gawker and its ilk (“And what is The Hair Spin?” One lawyer inquired). 

Elena Ferrante, Orhan Pamuk, Kenzaburō Ōe, and Eka Kurniawan are on the longlist for the Man Booker International Prize, whose previous winners include Philip Roth, Lydia Davis, and László Krasznahorkai.

Nicolas

FiveThirtyEight analyzes Bernie Sanders’s surprise win in the Michigan primary, and what it may mean for the Democratic race: “If Michigan was just a fluke (which is possible), then tonight will be forgotten soon enough,” Harry Enten writes. “If, however, pollsters are missing something more fundamental about the electorate, then the Ohio and Illinois primaries could be a lot closer than expected. Either way, this result will send a shock wave through the press. Heck, I’m a member of the press, and you might be able to tell how surprised I am.”

Meanwhile, Time notes that Ben Carson is still

The opening round of the Tournament of Books begins tomorrow.

Thanks to a Supreme Court ruling that refused its appeal, Apple will now be forced to pay out $400 million to ebook buyers who were affected by its illegal price-fixing.

There is a funeral mass today for Pat Conroy, bestselling author of The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini, who died on Friday.

Michael Bloomberg, in a Bloomberg column, has ruled out a run for President, for fear of aiding the candidacy of Ted Cruz or Donald Trump: “I have known Mr. Trump casually for many years, and we have always been on friendly terms. I

Bill McKibben, the author of Earth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet and the founder of the environmentalist organization 350.org, laments the lack of attention paid to last week’s news about global warming: “Thursday, while the nation debated the relative size of Republican genitalia, something truly awful happened. Across the northern hemisphere, the temperature, if only for a few hours, apparently crossed a line: it was more than two degrees Celsius above 'normal' for the first time in recorded history and likely for the first time in the course of human civilization.”

Last week, Roxane

Poet and professor Matthew Zapruder is taking over as poetry column editor for the New York Times magazine as of this week. He takes pleasure in the idea that a poem placed in the magazine can “follow up on, refract, amplify, reconfigure, the language of culture and news. . . . The poem gets a chance to exist in a place that is not isolated or rarified. It gets to be a part of life, and we get to read it that way, too.”

Adam Johnson has won this year’s Story Prize for Fortune Smiles, the collection that also won him the National Book Award (Johnson is the first to win both prizes for the same

Longlists have been announced for the Orwell Prize for Journalism, and for the much more enticingly named Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils.

has refused a parting deal with the network that would have prevented her talking about the problems there via a “non-disparagement clause.” "They wanted us to cover politics in the narrowest sense," CNN Money quotes her as saying. "I told my team, we can't allow our own show to go off air and then provide racial cover by having me continue to host the show so people see the little black girl up there.”

Ahead of International Women’s Day

The New Yorker’s long-serving managing editor, Silvia Killingsworth, will be taking over as editor of |http://nymag.com/following/2016/02/matt-buchanan-is-leaving-the-awl.html#|the Awl|, and while she’s at it, will be in charge of a relaunch of the Hairpin.

Nine writers, including Helen Garner, C. E. Morgan, and Hilton Als, received one of Yale’s Windham-Campbell Prizes this week: Always good, as the program director Michael Kelleher points out, to get a call “out of the blue” offering you $150,000.

Among the winners is Branden Jacob-Jenkins—who said ”I only wish everyone alive could get a