The New York Public Library has announced the finalists for the 2022 Young Lions Fiction Award.

The New York Times Book Review has dedicated an issue to poetry for National Poetry Month: Elisa Gabbert writes about the difficulty of defining exactly what makes a poem, Stephanie Burt reviews Linda Gregerson, Daisy Fried revisits the work of Nelly Sachs, and more. 

The deadline for the FSG Writer’s Fellowship has been extended until April 22. The program offers support to writers from underrepresented communities including mentorship and ta $15,000 award. The judges this year are Sheila Heti,

Elon Musk has launched a $43-billion-dollar cash bid to buy Twitter. Bloomberg reports: “Unsatisfied with the influence that comes with being Twitter’s largest investor, he has now launched a full takeover, one of the few individuals who can afford it outright.” In The Nation, professor Victor Pickard writes about why it’s a bad idea for billionaires to have control over social-media platforms, which have become de facto public utilities.  

The BuzzFeed News union has announced that it has tentatively agreed to a contract after two years of bargaining. 

In the Los Angeles Review of Books,

The National Book Foundation has announced its 2022 “5 Under 35,” the award for young authors to watch. At Vulture, Hillary Kelly discusses the nominees. 

The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books is back this year with indoor and outdoor author events at the University of Southern California during the weekend of April 23–24. General admission tickets for talks with Joy Williams, Jonathan Lethem, Clint Smith, Imani Perry, Melissa Febos, and more will be available starting April 17. 

At GQ, Gabriella Paiella interviews Adrien Chiles, “the internet’s most delightful columnist,” who is known for

Nina MacLaughlin, the author most recently of Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung, is working on a project writing short fictions based on the sculptor Richard Serra’s 1967 list of verbs and concepts. Online at n+1, you can read an excerpt comprising three sections: “To Dapple,” “To Remove,” and “To Store.” 

In the new issue of the New Yorker, comic artist Joe Sacco illustrates a story by Russian graphic artist Victoria Lomasko. In the opening panel, Sacco explains that Lomasko had to flee Moscow and leave her art supplies behind. In their collaboration, “The Collective Shame of Putin’s War,” Lomasko

Peter Maass, the author of Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War, writes about Ron Haviv’s photographs of a Kyiv suburb, which depict cars, bicycles, strollers, and other objects abandoned by Ukrainians desperately trying to flee the war. “These photos tell us the beginnings of stories that we dread following to their ends. There is a cane on the ground—what happened to its owner? Were they scooped up by a relative who realized their grandmother or grandfather was moving too slowly to survive the bombs? Did they fall by the roadside, alone? Their body, is it over there somewhere?”

At the New Yorker

The new class of Guggenheim Fellows has been announced. The 2022 fellows in fiction and nonfiction include Jennifer Croft, Alexandra Kleeman, Hernan Diaz, Brandon Hobson, Maaza Mengiste, Christopher Sorrentino, and Melissa Febos, among others. 

At Gawker, Erin Somers notes an uptick in critics’ use of the German term “Künstlerroman.” Somers first noticed the word in Hermione Hoby’s Bookforum review of Sean Thor Conroe’s novel Fuccboi, and has since endeavored to find the source of what seems to be a trend. According to Somers, that credit goes to Sam Lipsyte, who reminded her never to omit

The International Booker Prize shortlist has been announced. The six nominees include Olga Tokarczuk and translator Jennifer Croft, who won the award in 2018 for Flights. The winner will be announced on May 26.

For Vulture, Jasmine Sanders profiles Margo Jefferson, the author of the new memoir Constructing a Nervous System. Sanders writes, “As a reader, I find Jefferson most enrapturing when . . . she bins her gentility for something sharper. Tending her envy, tallying slights both personal and historical, indulging her gloomier moods: the well-comported girl no more.”

New York Times executive

The PEN World Voices Festival will hold an emergency summit in May in response to the war in Ukraine. More than one hundred writers will gather, and the Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov will deliver a speech “that will address threats to democracy and free expression.” 

Rabih Alameddine has won this year’s PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for his novel The Wrong End of the Telescope, which follows a transgender doctor working in Lesbos at a camp for Syrian refugees. “In a year of stunning and important fiction,” judges Eugenia Kim, Rebecca Makkai, and Rion Amilcar Scott note, “this work stands

Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal has announced that Elon Musk is joining the board of the social-media giant. Musk began his tenure with a Twitter poll asking if users want an “edit” function, which garnered an overwhelming response. 

Chloé Cooper Jones talks about her new memoir, Easy Beauty: “There is this idea from the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch that I use very explicitly in my narrative but then also implicitly, in the structure and craft of the book. Put simply: Iris Murdoch argued that we can only perceive things based on the way that we conceptualize them.”

Tonight, Politics &

Roxane Gay has announced the first three books that will be published by her new Grove Atlantic imprint: And Then He Sang a Lullaby, the debut novel from twenty-three-year-old Nigerian writer and activist Ani Kayode Somtochukwu; J. V. Lyon’s novel Lush Lives; and Hot Springs Drive, a novel from Lindsay Hunter, the author of Ugly Girls and Eat Only When You’re Hungry.

Larua Miller writes about Mick Herron’s “hilarious, unique” spy novels, which are the inspiration for the new TV series Slow Horses, starring Gary Oldman, Kristin Scott Thomas, and Jonathan Pryce. “If James Bond is a fantasy of

Richard Howard, former poet laureate of New York, essayist, and translator of Roland Barthes, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Charles Baudelaire, Simone de Beauvoir, and many other French writers, died on Thursday at the age of ninety-two. His 1969 collection, Untitled Subjects, which presents dramatic monologues given by fifteen Victorians and Edwardians, won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. As the editor of George Braziller’s publishing house’s poetry series, he championed younger poets including Charles Simic and Frank Bidart; he was also poetry editor of the Paris Review in the 1990s and early 2000s.

The Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize shortlist has been announced. The nominees include Anuk Arudpragasam, Brandon Taylor, Patricia Lockwood, and more. You can hear Arudpragasam discuss the nominated book, A Passage North, with Megha Majumdar as part of Bookforum’s “No Wrong Answers” video series.   

The New York Review of Books has just published its spring books issue, with Merve Emre on Elizabeth Hardwick, Nicole Rudick on Sarah Manguso, Jackson Lears on Samuel Moyn, and more. 

In the New York Times, Alex Vadukul profiles Matthew Gasda, the playwright behind the underground hit Dimes