Last night, the Kirkus Prize, one of the most lucrative book awards in the world at $50,000 for each winner, went to Hanya Yanagihara, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Pam Muñoz Ryan.

In the New York Times magazine, Jonathan Mahler revisits the strange tale of Osama bin Laden’s killing—"not only a victory for the U.S. military but also for the American storytelling machine”—and the official statements, reporting, and other accounts of it (including Kathryn Bigelow’s 2012 film Zero Dark Thirty, which she rather grandly called “the first rough cut of history”). Mahler interviews Seymour Hersh, whose LRB

The shortlist for the National Book Award is out, and some helpful soul has collected free samples of most of the books in question, including the memoirs by Sally Mann and Ta-Nehisi Coates, fiction by Lauren Groff and Hanya Yanagihara, and poetry by Terrance Hayes and Ada Limón.

In a “leap-out-of-the-bathtub moment,” as he told the New York Times, an American scholar has found the earliest draft of the King James Bible, a notebook from the early seventeenth century in which one of the translators seems to have puzzled out his allotted section and then taken over someone else’s: “Some of them,

Marlon James—who once deleted the manuscript of his first novel after having it rejected seventy-eight times—yesterday became the first Jamaican writer to win the Booker Prize, for A Brief History of Seven Killings.

It seems some of the bigger magazines have been feeling the lack of “a very passionate audience of millennial males,” but never fear, Condé Nast has solved the problem by buying Pitchfork Media, owner of the independent music site. If you hadn’t been feeling especially worried lately about how to please male millennials, the Atlantic notes that this might be “a reminder that larger

The winner of this year’s Booker Prize will be announced in a few hours’ time—meanwhile, you can hear from both the candidates and the judges.

For T magazine, Rachel Kushner goes to Santa Cruz for a conversation with her friend Jonathan Franzen (whom, “for the record,” she considers “principally a comic writer”) about Edward Snowden, Faust, and the rivalry between Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.

And if that doesn't seem quite stately enough, for the New York Review of Books, President Obama goes to Des Moines, Iowa, for a long chat with Marilynne Robinson (you can only read the first half, so far).

Author and blogger Andrew Sullivan says he’s currently working on a book about Christianity.

Today is is the day that Joshua Cohen—the Harper’s book reviewer and the author, most recently, of the novel Book of Numbers—will begin rewriting Charles Dickens’s debut novel, The Pickwick Papers. Cohen will write his book, PCKWCK, online, for five hours a day, and visitors to the site will be able to watch his writing appear in real time. Visitors will also be able to offer feedback. Cohen’s fiction has been suspicious of online “crowds,” and the author’s interactions with his audience will be, we

Two of Svetlana Alexievich’s translators responded in the Guardian to yesterday’s announcement that she had won the Nobel Prize in Literature: Bela Shayevich, who’s at work on an English version of Second-hand Time, her “collection of oral histories from the dissolution of the Soviet Union to the anti-Putin protests of 2012,” quoted from Alexievich’s introduction: “History’s sole concern is the facts; emotions are outside of its realm of interest. . . . But I look at the world as a writer, and not strictly an historian.” And Keith Gessen (who translated Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History

The Belarusian writer and journalist Svetlana Alexievich, the bookies’ favorite, has won this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature for her “polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage.” “Life offers so many versions and interpretations of the same events that neither fiction nor document alone can keep up with its variety,” she told an interviewer when her oral history Voices from Chernobyl was published. “I felt compelled to find a different narrative strategy. I decided to collect the voices from the street, the material lying about around me. Each person offers a text of his or

If the premise of Stephen King’s Misery always struck you as an appealing one, now—or next week—is your moment. Starting Monday, the publishers of the newborn Useless Press (which aims to make “internet things” more interesting than the usual) will be metaphorically chaining the novelist Joshua Cohen to his desk, where he’ll spend his afternoons writing a novel live online for a week, subjected to feedback from readers every morning as the text emerges. If Charles Dickens had had an anxiety dream while writing the Pickwick Papers, it might have looked something like this: For five hours every

Best-selling Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell, who created the character of Kurt Wallander, died yesterday at age sixty-seven. The Guardian noted that he “took the existing Swedish tradition of crime writing as a form of leftwing social criticism and gave it international recognition,” and the Los Angeles Times looked back at its own reviews of Mankell over the years, including one from 2006 that rather winningly admired his resistance to the “tendency among some Scandinavian writers (think Ibsen, Strindberg) to cast a sense of gloom over their works.”

A Mother Jones reporter charged with

Ira Silverberg—who has been the editor in chief of Grove Press, an agent at Donadio & Olson and at Sterling Lord Literistic, and the Literature Director of the National Endowment of for the Arts—has started a new position as senior editor at Simon & Schuster.

In a new essay, author Jedediah Purdy dwells on the similarities between Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me and Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels: “They are representative work for a time when representation—politically, aesthetically—is at its most fraught, in speaking for others and also in putting forward one’s self.”

When

In the wake of another mass shooting, this time at a college campus in Oregon, there has been disagreement over how journalists should proceed in reporting such events immediately after the fact, especially when using social media. In responding to the events in Oregon, the president made a statement that Vox calls “as angry as Obama publicly gets”: “We know that other countries, in response to one mass shooting, have been able to craft laws that almost eliminate mass shootings. . . . So we know there are ways to prevent it. And, of course, what’s also routine is that somebody, somewhere will

You can read Andrew Roberts’s review of Niall Ferguson’s authorized Henry Kissinger biography in this Sunday’s New York TimesBook Review. But you might want to prepare first by reading this review of the review by Greg Grandin, author of a more critical Kissinger biography. He points out that the Times’s usual rules on conflicts of interest ought to preclude assigning this one to Roberts, an old friend of both the book’s author and its subject (Kissinger, in fact, originally asked Roberts to write the biography himself): “The Times might as well have asked Kissinger to review his own biography.