Svetlana Alexievich (”Flaubert called himself a human pen; I would say that I am a human ear”) delivered the annual Nobel lecture in Sweden, quoting extensively from her own diaries and from the other voices her work makes space for. And in light of her observation that “I am often told, even now, that what I write isn't literature, it's a document,” Jonathon Sturgeon reads her as the most contemporary of writers.

Novelist Bret Easton Ellis has an op-ed about how we’re all too eager to be liked nowadays. Offering the experiences of his controversial youth as self-help for those he sees as

After the UK government decided to go ahead with airstrikes against Syria, the writer Michael Faber, in a Swiftian satirical gesture, sent Prime Minister David Cameron a copy of his latest novel with a note suggesting that “a book cannot compete with a bomb in its ability to cause death and misery, but each of us must make whatever small contribution we can, and I figure that if you drop my novel from a plane, it might hit a Syrian on the head.” He concluded: “With luck, we might even kill a child: their skulls are quite soft.”

Readers of Time magazine apparently favor Bernie Sanders for

On Saturday, the New York Times ran an op-ed on page one, above the fold. “End the Gun Epidemic in America” points out the obvious necessity for better regulation of firearms. “It is not necessary to debate the peculiar wording of the Second Amendment,” the editorial reads. “No right is unlimited and immune from reasonable regulation.” In another Saturday print-edition article (not on page one) titled “Gun Debate Yields Page One Editorial,” the Times provides us with some of its own history: notably, the paper has not run an editorial on page one since 1920, when it bemoaned the Republican

There has been much discussion of the New York Daily News cover about the California mass shooting this week, though it doesn’t seem all that controversial under the circumstances.

The French Booksellers’ Association has provided a reading list for the public in the wake of the November attacks in Paris.

Bookforum contributor Melissa Anderson has been named senior film critic at the Village Voice, where, as well as reviewing new movies, she’ll have a weekly column on New York’s arthouse and repertory scene.

A seventeenth-century biography of Walatta Petros, an Ethiopian noblewoman and

It's hard to know what to say after the latest mass shooting, which killed at least fourteen yesterday in California. That's partly because people have been saying so much about this for so long, and it keeps on happening: NBC News notes that there have been more mass shootings than days in the calendar year so far, and that the US accounts for nearly a third of these incidents worldwide. It might be time to reread Bookforum editor Chris Lehmann's piece on gun violence, written after Sandy Hook (this latest shooting is reportedly the deadliest we've seen since).

The Paris Review has appointed

Morrissey has won the UK’s annual Bad Sex Award with his otherwise un-garlanded first novel, List of the Lost. The scene that helped him beat out competition from the likes of Joshua Cohen and Erica Jong involves “a giggling snowball of full-figured copulation,” a “clamorous rollercoaster coil of sexually violent rotation”, and a “bulbous salutation,” though it’s unclear whether these were so arranged as to take full advantage of the rhyme.

There’s some more likable rhyming to be found near the end of Susan Bernofsky’s lovely tribute to Christopher Middleton, the poet and translator of Robert

In the current issue of the New York Review of Books, there’s an intriguing exchange between the editor of Hanya Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life and Daniel Mendelsohn, one of the critics Jennifer Weiner recently accused of “Goldfinching” (delegitimizing even literary fiction if it’s popular with large numbers of women) for his critical review of Yanagihara’s book. Howard seems to agree with Weiner: “Mendelsohn seems to have decided that A Little Life just appeals to the wrong kind of reader. That’s an invidious distinction unworthy of a critic of his usually fine discernment.” Mendelsohn

A Buzzfeed profile of Turkish journalist Can Dundar points out that more than one thousand reporters have been pushed out of their jobs since the reelection of president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has cracked down on the press. Dundar himself was imprisoned last week. The charge is espionage, and it is based on a report Dundar published in May that “included photos and videos alleging Turkish intelligence officials were smuggling weapons to Syrian rebel fighters described as jihadis in January 2014.”

PEN America has announced the winners of its annual Prison Writing Awards.

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Thanksgiving week seems an especially appropriate time to think about citizenship (e.g. Sarah Matthews on what it takes to get a green card), statelessness (e.g. an interview with Atossa Araxia Abrahamian about her intriguing new book The Cosmopolites), migration, and refugees. The last word should perhaps go to John Oliver, from his final show of the year, this past weekend: “Every generation has had its own ugly reaction to refugees, whether they are the Irish, the Vietnamese, the Cubans or the Haitians, and those fears have been broadly unfounded. In fact there was only one time in American

In a preview from the next issue of Bookforum, Jeff Sharlet writes about “imperial joking” and the November 13 attacks in Paris.

And on n+1’s website, Pankaj Mishra powerfully echoes Susan Sontag’s plea from September 2001: “Let’s by all means grieve together, but let’s not be stupid together.”

The writer Claire Vaye Watkins has an essay (originally a lecture) on literary misogyny, pandering, and “punching up.”

The artist and actress Adele Mailer (née Morales) died on Sunday, age ninety. A New York Times obituary quotes from her memoir: “I decided I was going to be that beautiful temptress

David Remnick reports on the group Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, “a kind of underground journalistic-activist enterprise that, under the threat of grisly execution, smuggles images and reports on ISIS from Raqqa to its allies abroad.”

Screenwriter Phyllis Nagy discusses her screenplay for Todd Haynes’s Carol, his new adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 “cult lesbian classic” The Price of Salt. How did Highsmith “get to the fundamentals of love?” Says Nagy: “Part of this is Pat Highsmith’s own peculiar psyche, which was obsessional. All the great novels about love—Madame Bovary, all

Michel Houellebecq (whose novel Submission is reviewed in a forthcoming issue of Bookforum) has weighed in on the situation in France with a | http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/11/21/opinion/how-frances-leaders-failed-its-people.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone∣=nytcore-iphone-share&referer=https://t.co/8hct9vKat7|rather strange op-ed|.

Turns out writers of literary fiction can still get rich! Just only a few of them at a time. The Wall Street Journal blames that catch-all villain social media: “Sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Goodreads have contributed to a culture in which everyone reads—and