The National Book Awards were announced last night in Manhattan. Phil Klay won for his short-story collection Redeployment (beating out our favorite, Marilynne Robinson), Louise Glück won for her poetry collection Faithful and Virtuous Night, and Evan Osnos won for his nonfiction book Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China. Ursula K. Le Guin received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In her speech, Le Guin was critical: The literary community should take science fiction and fantasy more seriously, and writers and editors should stop

On Monday, at a dinner at the Waverly Inn, an executive of Uber suggested that the company ought to hire people to smear journalists—PandoDaily’s Sarah Lacy was the example—who have criticized their practices. (Lacy had recently written about the sexism in the company’s corporate culture.) Unfortunately for Uber, a Buzzfeed editor was at the dinner. In the aftermath of the story, written by Ben Smith, Uber’s CEO apologized for the company and on behalf of the executive, Emil Michael, in a series of tweets that is especially amusing, as the Awl pointed out, when accompanied by a Twitter avatar

Tonight, at Book Court in Brooklyn, join Laura Kipnis for a launch party for her new book, Men: Notes from an Ongoing Investigation.

Jonathan Franzen’s next novel, Purity, will be released in September of next year. Franzen’s editor, Jonathan Galassi, says the book has a fabulist element, a “mythic undertone.” The story follows a young woman in search of her father’s identity, and describes her relationship to a hacker and whistleblower. An authorized biography of Franzen—Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy of Rage, by Swarthmore professor Philip Weinstein—arrives next year as well. Anti-Franzen

On Friday, a federal appeals court decided in a two-to-one vote that Michael Lewis did not a libel a money manager in the bestselling book The Big Short, about the 2007–2008 financial crisis. The suit focused on Lewis’s chapter "Spider-Man at the Venetian," which detailed a 2007 conversation between Wing Chau and hedge-fund manager Steven Eisman. Chau and his firm, Harding Advisory LLC, sued Lewis, Eisman, and publisher W. W. Norton, saying that the book made him and other CDOs look like “crooks or morons.”

At the Awl, Jacqui Shine offers an impressive essay on the New York Times’s much-loathed

Amazon and Hachette have announced that they’ve reached an agreement following their months-long dispute: Hachette will now be allowed to decide its own e-book prices. Michael Pietsch, the CEO, sounded satisfied with the outcome, calling it “great news for writers.” But the New Republic argues that Hachette ought to have kept up the fight for longer: What was getting fought over was bigger than e-book pricing, and the consequences of Amazon’s strong-arming of Hachette will continue to reverberate: “If Amazon continues to interfere in publishers’ pricing decisions, publishers will be forced to

Gone Girl writer Gillian Flynn has written a comic, Masks, about a mother who retaliates against her son’s bully. It will be released by Dark Horse in February.

Lynne Tillman on cynicism at Frieze: “I’m not a cynic. I prefer irony, which depends on the ability to hold contradictory ideas, which probably springs from ambivalence. People confuse and conflate irony with insincerity and dishonesty; they believe an ironist isn’t serious. But saying the opposite of what is meant allows for at least two meanings to fly.”

Ed Park is leaving Amazon and the Little A imprint he helped to launch to become

The Awl announces a redesign and asks for submissions. They’re looking for stuff about “architecture; urbanism (but not the dull, aggravating kind); interesting pieces or works of criticism about movies, books, television, or music that are not simply reviews or recaps or RED HOT TAKES; observed non-fiction; offbeat works about fashion and style; stories about places and cities and towns that aren’t New York (and also that are) and the people living in them that would work wonderfully in an alt-weekly; labor and capital and activism(!);videogames because why not; food and drink; history, personal

The New Yorker is instating a paywall today, after months of offering everything in the magazine for free. Readers will have access to six free articles a month, after which they will need to subscribe. Anything on the website will count towards the six, in effect erasing the distinction (and implicit hierarchy) between ‘web’ pieces and ‘magazine’ pieces, and providing an incentive for the magazine to make all its content equally good.

POLITICO has launched a new website, with four feature stories on its homepage, and a “fully responsive” design that will work on any platform.

The December

The 2014 Dylan Thomas award, which comes with a £30,000 cash prize, has been given to Joshua Ferris for his novel To Rise Again at a Decent Hour. The award goes to any thirty-nine-year-old playwright, novelist, or poet. 

Twitter has plans to open an office in Hong Kong in early 2015. The office will mainly house sales staff, charged with working with advertisers, especially Chinese companies "looking to go global." Seventy-seven percent of Twitter users are outside of the US, but only 34 percent of the company's revenue has international origins. Twitter hasn't been allowed in China since

St. Martin’s Press has bought a debut novel by Stephanie Clifford, a New York Times reporter, for seven figures. The book, Everybody Rise, describes a young woman’s social and professional striving in 2006-era Manhattan.

Jian Ghomeshi has lost his book deal with Penguin Random House Canada, in the wake of allegations of violent sexual assault on eight women he has been involved with. He’s also lost his job, his agent, his PR firm, and his crisis management firm.

Snapchat is in talks with Buzzfeed, Comedy Central, Time, National Geographic, Spotify, Vice, and others about “Discover,” a proposed

The Virginia-based conservative website the Independent Journal Review—a cross between RedState and Buzzfeed, according to one of the site’s advisors—is becoming increasingly popular. Its traffic—about 24 million unique visitors per month— outstrips that of the Drudge Report and Breitbart News, and the founders are proud of drawing more readers with fewer stories than other similar websites. In August the IJReview received 14 million Facebook shares for 646 articles, while the Huffington Post published thirty-eight times as many articles for only four times as many shares. The founders credit