The National Book Award last night went to Adam Johnson for his story collection Fortune Smiles, and to the seemingly unstoppable Ta-Nehisi Coates, MacArthur Genius, for Between the World and Me. 

Meanwhile, what Toni Morrison did for Coates, CNN’s Don Lemon is happy to do for himself: If he weren’t a journalist, he tells Ana Marie Cox, he’d “probably be a writer like James Baldwin.” (Or failing that, an activist: “But not like Dr. King, even though I admire him. I’d probably be more of a Malcolm X. I believe the best way to improve yourself is to improve yourself.”)

Roundup season is in full

It seems to make sense to give Don DeLillo a medal, so tonight at Cipriani, the National Book Foundation plans to go ahead and do that.

The shortlist for the UK’s annual Bad Sex in Fiction award has been announced: Several American writers made it, including Erica Jong, Lauren Groff, and Joshua Cohen, as well as, for the first time, an author published by Penguin Classics (though, admittedly, that author is Morrissey, for his first novel). Call Me Dave, the biography of David Cameron that spawned the #piggate scandal, lost out for what the judges called “insufficient literary brio” (fans of

As President Francois Hollande announces a crackdown at home and abroad, it’s worth reading what Judith Butler had to say from Paris this weekend.

“Only a woman would be thanked for ‘helping out’”: A former Gawker staffer writes about the company’s problem with women, including a boys’ club tendency to keep offering story tips and promotions to the men, while treating female colleagues (in the words of Jezebel founder Anna Holmes) as either “emotional caretakers and moral compasses” who must “clean up other people’s messes,” or “circus acts,” “good for pageviews but ultimately very disposable.”

In the wake of the attacks in Paris, the novelist Laila Lalami writes with urgency in The Nation about ISIS, Saudi Arabia, and Western governments.

And Buzzfeed has an account of the scene at Shakespeare and Company, the well-known bookstore where some twenty people were able to take refuge on Friday night.

Who owns Anne Frank?

The Guardian has an interview with Marilynne Robinson: “What saint is it that puts Foxe’s Acts and Monuments on the internet? I mean, the irony of a culture that truly supplies so much to be known and at the same time turns its back on the whole privilege of knowing—it’s

Mexican author Fernando del Paso, who has described himself as “a baroque writer, extravagant and immoderate,” has won the coveted $135,000 Cervantes Prize.

The New York Times magazine asked George Saunders and Jennifer Egan to discuss writing about the future, which they did, by phone and email. Here's Egan: “I learned you have to move fast, writing futuristic satire in America: Before you know it, you’re a realist!” And Saunders: “There are some parallels between writing about the future and writing about the past. Neither interests me at all, if the intention is just to ‘get it right.’ It’s

The Goldsmiths prize for innovative fiction was awarded to Kevin Barry for Beatlebone, a novel in which John Lennon goes to Ireland for a course of primal scream therapy.

“Like the hub at the center of a wheel”: Molly McArdle profiles Rachel Fershleiser, Tumblr’s director of literary outreach. “I want to be a rich crazy lady who patronizes writers,” Fershleiser says. “I can’t actually be that, so I try to do it in baby steps.”

The best thing about The Atlantic’s piece on why writers often love running is the suggestion that Joyce Carol Oates (author of scores of books under her own name and

At a Donald Trump rally in Springfield, IL, on Monday, a woman read from Citizen, Claudia Rankine’s award-winning book about racism and “microaggressions” in contemporary America, while Trump gave his speech. Apparently some Trump supporters were so bothered that they asked her to stop.

Little, Brown has announced that it plans to publish a posthumous manifesto by Stéphane Charbonnier, the Charlie Hebdo editor in chief who was killed earlier this year. Charbonnier finished the book, Open Letter: On Blasphemy, Islamophobia and the True Enemies of Free Expression, two days before his death.

US

The New York Times has a piece about whether activists like those at the University of Missouri should allow reporters more access to their encampments. The university is in the spotlight this week as its president and a chancellor have both been forced to step down over their failure to adequately address “persistent racism” on campus: The decisive moment seems to have come when the college football team refused to play over the weekend, announcing that they would strike until the president was gone.

After nearly a decade, Slate’s Emily Yoffe is stepping down from the Dear Prudence column

This weekend, Ben Carson continued to defend himself from media scrutiny: In response to claims that his 1990 autobiography, Gifted Hands, contains inaccuracies, Carson said he is not entirely responsible and shifted the blame to his co-author, Cecil Murphey.

The official story of Pablo Neruda’s death is that the Nobel laureate died in a hospital due to complications caused by cancer. But recently, questions about the Chilean poet’s true cause of death have been raised—some wondered if he, like many other Chileans during Pinochet’s dictatorship, was murdered. In 2013, the government agreed to

In the field of Republican lit this week: George H. W. Bush has decided to weigh in on his son’s presidency: Donald Rumsfeld, he felt, according to his new book, “served the president badly. . . . There’s a lack of humility, a lack of seeing what the other guy thinks. He’s more kick ass and take names, take numbers.” Dick Cheney has responded to the elder Bush’s characterization of him as an “iron-ass” by claiming it as “a mark of pride.” Meanwhile, several journalists have been shouldering the burden of reading the current presidential candidates’ books and letting us know what’s in them:

Everyone is enjoying the delicious irony of Amazon’s new show, Good Girls Revolt, being “fundamentally premised on the championing of employees’ rights.”

Fear and loathing, meanwhile, greets the judge who recently decided to let Hulk Hogan dig through Gawker’s e-mail, a move that is, in the words of the New York Observer’s editors, “scaring the hell out of lots of publishers.”

Veteran editor John Freeman offers a somewhat breathless account (and who can blame him?) of his experience publishing Lydia Davis.

In the New York Times, a brief interview with the formidable Roberto Calasso, whose

Mathias Énard, the author, most famously, of Zone, a novel in a single sentence, has won the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary award (its seriousness is heavily underlined by its $10 prize money).

Steve Silberman discusses his book on autism, Neurotribes, which just became the first work of popular science to win the Samuel Johnson Prize for nonfiction.

And if you’d like to feel drunk with power for once, voting is now open for this year’s Goodreads Choice Awards, “the only major book awards decided by readers.”

You can now read what Margaret Atwood and her students discovered