South African psychologist and novelist Zainub Priya Dala (ZP Dala) has been violently attacked, and is now being held in a mental institution—punishment, many allege, for a recent speech in which she praised Salman Rushdie. PEN America is demanding her immediate release.

Vice has posted an excerpt from Farrar, Straus and Giroux publisher Jonathan Galassi’s forthcoming novel, Muse. The excerpt is, among other things, a portrait of the aggressive deal-making that takes place at the Frankfurt Book Fair, where Galassi’s novel was bought by Knopf in 2013. “Rights directors were the most visible

The 2015 Guggenheim Fellows have been announced; winners include Jeffery Renard Allen, Meghan Daum, Alex Ross, Cathy Park Hong, Percival Everett, Rivka Galchen, and Kevin Powers.

At the New Yorker’s Page Turner blog, Leslie Jamison considers Chris Kraus’s work and how Kraus has resisted the idea that her novels are confessional (Kraus’s 2006 novel Torpor was reissued by Semiotext(e) earlier this year). Jamison quotes Kraus saying that she wants to address vulnerability “at some remove,” and looks at the ways in which Kraus’s genre-resistant writings use scenes from her real life as a way to

WAM asks: “Are white writers published in gross disproportion to writers of color?” Two questions that might seem to answer each other.

An exciting new episode of the New Yorker’s Comma Queen series, starring the magazine resident grammar goddess Mary Norris, has been posted online.

Today is the official launch date of Literary Hub, “a new home for book lovers” that is supported by more than 125 industry partners. “Each day the site—led by editor in chief Jonny Diamond and executive editor John Freeman—will have a main feature from a partner, an exclusive book excerpt, and original content,” says the press release. Because it’s a books site supported by publishers, we will be interested to see if coverage will be uniformly positive, a la Buzzfeed and The Believer.

Beirut-based Kaelen Wilson-Goldie has written a deeply thoughtful and eloquent article about the Charlie

The Columbia Graduate School of Journalism’s report on the discredited Rolling Stone story, “A Rape on Campus,” concludes that the piece’s mistakes were systemic and could have been avoided, noting “the failure encompassed reporting, editing, editorial supervision and fact-checking.” Rolling Stone has retracted the article and replaced it with the Columbia report, calling it “an anatomy of journalistic failure,” while Gawker says the problem was “pathological conflict-avoidance.” At The Guardian, Jessica Valenti writes that the magazine’s response to the crisis will cause more harm, as the

It’s been ten years since Judith Miller left the New York Times, after her reports that Saddam Hussein had built or acquired weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were discredited. On Friday, in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, she sought to correct what she calls “false narratives” about her Iraq coverage. “The newsworthy claims of some of my prewar WMD stories were wrong,” Miller wrote. “But so is the enduring, pernicious accusation that the Bush administration fabricated WMD intelligence to take the country to war." The timing of this article is probably no coincidence: Miller’s new book,

BuzzFeed is starting a fellowship for young writers. The site’s new literary editor, poet Saeed Jones, is also planning what he calls a whole “literary movement” that involves a magazine, readings, and a salon series. Jones says, “I think it’s fair to say there were a few skeptics initially about the idea of book culture and BuzzFeed culture coming together, but it totally works. I’m excited to push us even further and publish new fiction, poems and lyric essays by writers we adore.”

At Publishers Weekly, some reactions to this week’s Business Insider story about the breakdown in negotiations

Alan Rusbridger will leave his position as the editor in chief of The Guardian this summer, but before he goes, he plans to run an “unprecedented,” six-month series of articles about climate change. Working with the environmental activist organization 350.org, Rusbridger will conclude with a campaign called “Keep it in the Ground,” which will, among other things, call for the Bill and Melinda Gates' Foundation and the Wellcome Trust to cut their ties with fossil-fuel companies. The Guardian Media Group announced today that it is selling off all of its fossil-fuel assets, making the company’s

The New York Times will provide headlines and short article summaries—with emojis—to the Apple Watch.

Emily St. John Mandel’s novel Station Eleven has defeated Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See in the Morning News’s Tournament of Books final. One of the judges, Victor Lavalle, says of the two books: “Both risk looking foolishly hopeful, about love or art, and they’re infinitely better for it. It was, finally, a question of scale that solidified my decision. Somehow a small slice of the apocalypse left me feeling fuller than a large serving of a world at war.”

Colson Whitehead reflects

The New York Review has reprinted some of Hilary Mantel’s written advice to actors who are performing the stage adaptation of her historical novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. To Cardinal Archbishop Thomas Wolsey, she states: “You are, arguably, Europe’s greatest statesman and greatest fraud.”

Ben S. Bernanke, the former Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, has started a new economics blog at the Brookings Institute’s website. Inaugural post: “Why are interests rates so low?”

This June, a collection of early Elmore Leonard stories will be posthumously published.

Last night, HBO aired

Nicole Krauss (The History of Love) has reportedly sold her next two books for $4 million to Harper, making a departure from her previous publisher, Norton. The first of these two books, Late Wonder, is described rather abstractly as “a searching and metaphysical novel about transformation, about moving in the opposite direction from all that is known and apparent.” The second title, How to Be a Man, is a book of stories.

A sneak peak at the cover of Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Purity, which, as some have pointed out, features an image that bears resemblance to Gerhard Richter iconic paintings

In The Baffler, Evgeny Morozov writes about the problems of technology criticism (he thinks it is willfully oblivious to political and social realities), and explains why he’s decided to abandon the profession: “For a long time, I’ve considered myself a technology critic. Thus, I must acknowledge defeat as well: contemporary technology criticism in America is an empty, vain, and inevitably conservative undertaking. At best, we are just making careers; at worst, we are just useful idiots.” At his blog, tech critic Nicholas Carr answers Morozov’s critique: “Morozov has come to believe that the