The National Book Festival (September 25th–27th) and the Brooklyn Book Festival (September 28th–October 5th) will both be held online this year. The National Book Festival will include readings by Colson Whitehead, Marlon James, Carmen Maria Machado, Maaza Mengiste and dozens of other authors. The Brooklyn Book Fest will feature Hari Kunzru, Emily St. John Mandel, Brandon Taylor, Claudia Rankine, and many more.

Aperture magazine’s new issue, “Native America” is out now. Guest edited by Wendy Red Star, the issue covers photography and indigenous lives.

At the New Republic, Jacob Bacharach

The Kirkus Prize has announced this year’s finalists. Among the fiction finalists are Raven Leilani for Luster and James McBride for Deacon King Kong; nonfiction finalists include Deirdre Mask for The Address Book and Isabel Wilkerson for Caste.

New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos is publishing Joe Biden: The Life, the Run, and What Matters Now this fall from Scribner.

At the New York Times, Parul Sehgal reviews Dutch dairy farmer and poet Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s International Booker Prize–winning novel, The Discomfort of Evening. The book contains scenes of animal torture and incest, and

Oprah Winfrey’s next book club pick is Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, which Winfrey will discuss with the author in an eight-part miniseries on her new Oprah’s Book Club podcast.

The National Book Foundation’s lifetime achievement award will be presented to Carolyn Reidy, the late president and CEO of Simon & Schuster. Her husband, Stephen, who will accept the 2020 Literarian Award on her behalf, said that the distinction, which has never before been given posthumously, “would have surprised and honored her.”

In the New York Review of Books, Janet Malcolm writes

At Columbia Journalism Review, Serena Cho writes about how college newspapers are working to address systemic racism in the wake of the movement for Black Lives, often challenging traditional journalistic norms.

Yaa Gyasi talks to the Paris Review’s Langa Chinyoka about representing immigration experiences, toxic notions of Black respectability, and how her new novel, Transcendent Kingdom, came to be. The story was inspired by a neuroscientist friend of the author’s: “Around the time that Homegoing came out, she was publishing a big paper that she was really proud of and I was also very proud

At The Cut, Molly Fischer reviews Eula Biss’s new book, Having and Being Had, and considers the trap of the “Self-Aware” writer: “The problem isn’t the self-awareness itself. . . . The problem is the defensive postures that all the self-awareness seems to produce, among characters and the writers who create them.”

The Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize has been awarded to Lars Horn for Voice of the Fish.

Anthropologist, author, and activist David Graeber passed away yesterday at the age of fifty-nine. Graeber’s books include Debt: The First 5000 Years, The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis,

The American Literary Translators Association has announced the longlists for this year’s National Translation Awards in poetry and prose. Nominees include Jordan Stump’s translation of Marie NDiaye’s The Cheffe and Frank Wynne’s translation of Emiliano Monge’s Among the Lost.

The Noname Book Club has selected Disability Visibility and Capitalism and Disability as their books of the month.

Several influential writers, including Zadie Smith, George Monbiot, and Margaret Atwood, are demonstrating with Extinction Rebellion as part of its campaign against right-wing think tanks hindering climate

Kaveh Akbar has been named the poetry editor of The Nation.

At Vanity Fair, an essay by Jesmyn Ward on losing her husband to COVID-19, writing, and bearing witness: “My loss was a tender second skin. I shrugged against it as I wrote, haltingly, about this woman who speaks to spirits and fights her way across rivers. My commitment surprised me. Even in a pandemic, even in grief, I found myself commanded to amplify the voices of the dead that sing to me, from their boat to my boat, on the sea of time.”

Megha Majumdar’s A Burning has been longlisted for India’s 2020 JCB Prize for Literature,

Many books that were delayed last spring and this summer have been rescheduled for release this fall. On top of that, there has been, over the summer, a 12 percent spike in print-book sales. Now, Alexandra Alter reports at the New York Times, publishers are facing a significant challenge: “how to print all those books.” “Knopf and Pantheon are shifting the release of more than a dozen fall titles, including a memoir by the cookbook author Deborah Madison and a biography of Sylvia Plath, due to ‘severe capacity issues with our printing partners.’ The imprints are also delaying fiction by Robert

The large indie bookstore Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon will no longer sell titles on Amazon. CEO Emily Powell said the company had long seen the negative impact Amazon has had on bookstores and neighborhoods but that selling on the site “was hard to give up, sort of like smoking.”

Poetry magazine will not publish its September issue, as it works to revamp its editorial process and hiring practices. The magazine has had several high-profile resignations this summer after an outcry over the publication of a poem by Michael Dickman that used racist language as well as the Poetry Foundation’s

At Lit Hub, an excerpt from Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House about Hurricane Katrina, which hit fifteen years ago this week. This Saturday, Broom will discuss New Orleans as part of the Library of Congress’s National Book Festival.

Marieke Lucas Rijneveld has won the International Booker Prize for their novel The Discomfort of Evening. At twenty-nine years old, Rijneveld is the youngest person to have won the award. They will split the award with translator Michele Hutchison.

Ava DuVernay talks with Angela Davis at Vanity Fair about the movement for Black lives. Davis urges activists to

At Jacobin, Alex N. Press writes about the police shooting of Jacob Blake and wonders if the response from the Democrats will be merely rhetorical: “Kind words from Democrats may be more palatable than the Republican Party’s racist fearmongering, but they are nowhere near enough.” Press argues that the party should support the movement to defund the police, pointing out that Republicans will accuse them of doing so regardless of what their actual policies may be.

At The Nation, John Nichols compares the Republican National Convention to a ponzi scheme.

Eve L. Ewing reports on police unions,

At the New York Times, Elizabeth A. Harris and Concepción de León speak with food writers and chefs Toni Tipton-Martin, Nicole Taylor, and Kristina Gill about their experiences in book publishing. While there is increased demand for cookbooks by Black chefs, authors continue to face steep challenges before and after such book deals: “At every step, the teams involved tend to be overwhelmingly white. Some Black writers say this can put them in a position of having to explain the basics of the food they’re writing about.”

Jamel Brinkley, Ottessa Moshfegh, and more authors with work in the Paris