The Morning News Tournament of Books has commenced. In the opening round, David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks faces off against Ariel Schrag’s Adam (and wins).

Now that James Patterson has finished giving away a million dollars to independent bookstores around the country, he’s moving on to libraries. He has plans to distribute $1.25 million. Applications for the grant ask for a 200-300 statement of what the recipient would do with the money, and are due May 31 of this year. (Is it petty of us to suggest that $1.25 million won't be that much when split among numerous libraries?)

David Firestone

At the Page-Turner blog, Jelani Cobb contemplates the Justice Department’s investigation of the Ferguson, Missouri, police department. “The release of the report, just days before the first black President attended the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday, in Selma, made this week feel whipsawed by progress and stagnation.”

In 2006, novelist Stephen Beachy revealed in New York magazine that teen-hustler-turned-novelist JT Leroy—whose fans and supporters included Lou Reed, Mary Gaitskill, and Michael Chabon—was in fact a woman named Laura Albert. Following a flurry of

In response to complaints, Facebook has suspended New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz. Saltz has 55,000 followers (on Twitter and Instagram, he has more than 150,000) and frequently publishes what you might call “provocative” pictures and posts to his feed. One of the more recent pieces that he wrote that gained him a lot of attention was an article complaining about the conservatism of the art world, illustrated by images of penises, martyrdom, and defecation. He wrote, in response to Facebook’s move: “To all the purity police who complained that my medieval and ancient pics were ‘sexist,’

Coffee House Press is launching an imprint with Emily Books, the hybrid e-book publishing project started by Emily Gould and Ruth Curry. In the spring of 2016, the Minneapolis-based publisher will begin publishing two Emily Books titles a year, for which Gould and Curry will do the acquisitions and editing. The focus of the list will be on “transgressive writers of the past, present and future, with an emphasis on the writing of women, trans and queer people, writing that blurs genre distinctions and is funny, challenging and provocative.”

The Baffler, which is in the process of opening an

In the Paris Review’s interview with Elena Ferrante—the first-ever interview with the writer in person—Ferrante describes the crisis of confidence she experienced while working on The Days of Abandonment: “The hand was the same, the writing was the same, there was the same choice of vocabulary, same syntax, same punctuation, and yet the tone had become false. For months I felt that the preceding pages were beyond my abilities, and now I no longer felt equal to my own work. It made me bitter. You’d rather lose yourself than find yourself, I thought. Then everything started up again. But even

At the New Republic, Jamil Smith discusses the New York Times’s coverage of race, specifically its reassignment of Tanzina Vega from the race beat, which she had suggested herself, to the metropolitan section, and the more general tendency of papers across the country to shutter their race beats. Smith quotes Cord Jefferson, who wrote a piece for Matter last summer in which he described his exhaustion writing stories exclusively to do with race. Don’t “assign

The performance artist Marina Abramovic will publish a memoir next year, to coincide with her seventieth birthday.

At the Columbia

When the New York Post reported Jill Abramson’s new book deal with Simon and Schuster last week, it noted that some at the New York Times might be “nervous” about the book (Abramson was “abruptly dismissed” from her position as the paper’s executive editor last year). The Times has now run a story about the book deal. The story is fairly straightforward, but it does conclude with some skepticism about how much Abramson was actually paid for the book. After interviewing Alice Mayhew, who will edit it, the Times reports: “Ms. Mayhew declined to disclose what the publisher paid for the book in an

One of Kim Gordon’s favorite novelists is Mary Gaitskill. (Ours too.)

Tonight, at the Met, a “poetry parade” cosponsored by the Artist’s Institute. Reading aloud texts that respond to artworks in the museum will be Eileen Myles, Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer, and others. The event begins at 6:30 p.m. in the gallery of Egyptian art and concludes at 8:00 in the exhibition Madame Cézanne.

Former New York Times editor Jill Abramson has sold her book to Simon & Schuster for a sum believed to be around $1 million. ““I’ve been a front-line combatant in the news media’s battles to remain the

More from Jenny Diski, whose serialized memoir we can’t get enough of. In this installment, someone asks, about Diski’s complicated adolescence, “Why didn’t you just do what you were told?” Diski doesn’t know how to answer. “Doing what I was told simply didn’t have a place in my story of myself. It was perfectly clear that no one had any idea what to do, so they couldn’t very well tell me. And that to do as I was told would have been to listen to people who were completely out of their depth, without a clue what to do except wait until catastrophe knocked at the door. . . . No one very much

Tonight at the Lincoln Center Film Society, Tom McCarthy will celebrate the launch of his new novel, Satin Island, by introducing a double feature: Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, Johan Grimonprez’s 1997 essay film on the history of airplane hijackings, and Antony Balch and William S. Burroughs’s seminal 1963 collage/film Towers Open Fire.

The finished version of Kim Gordon’s memoir Girl in a Band, which went on sale yesterday, has deleted a comment about the musician Lana del Ray that appeared in the pre-publication galleys: “If she really truly believes it’s beautiful when young musicians go out on a

A judge in Chile has ruled that Pablo Neruda be reburied next to his wife, Matilde Urrutia, following an investigation into the causes of his death in 1973. For almost two years Neruda’s remains have been being studied in various laboratories to determine whether his death had been caused by poisoning.

The Associated Press is moving into podcasts: They’ve recently made a deal with the podcasting network PodcastOne that will allow its audio clips to be used by the company’s two hundred podcasts.

New York Magazine has a timeline—with choice quotes—of Andrew Sullivan’s blog, The Dish, which he

Today, Kate Bennett starts her new job at Politico as a DC gossip columnist.

Last week in Mother Jones, David Corn and Daniel Schulman asserted that Bill O’Reilly—who has devoted time on his show to attack Brian Williams for his deceptions—may have misrepresented his own experiences during the Falklands war in 1982. “For years, O'Reilly has recounted dramatic stories about his own war reporting that don't withstand scrutiny—even claiming he acted heroically in a war zone that he apparently never set foot in.” O’Reilly has tried to discredit the story on his show, and on his blog he wrote: “