In a raft of high-level promotions and restructuring at Condé Nast, Anna Wintour has been given two new titles: global editorial director of Vogue and worldwide chief content officer. As New York Times media reporter Edmund Lee notes, Wintour will now have “final say over publications in more than 30 markets around the world.”

The University of Mississippi has fired Garrett Felber, a tenure-track assistant professor and vocal scholar of Malcolm X, the American carceral state, and anti-racism, citing poor communication. In October, Felber took to Twitter to describe how the university rejected

Editor Gerald Howard looks back on the glory days of the American trade paperback. Howard worked at Penguin Books in the 1980s, when a productive rivalry with Vintage spurred a contemporary fiction boom: “There was a lot of fun to be had in publishing in those years by being ‘Contemporary.’ It was definitely a moment and people who worked in trade paperback in those years remember it fondly.”

At the Associated Press, Hillel Italie recaps a tumultuous year in publishing. As Simon & Schuster CEO Jonathan Karp puts it: “A lot of what has happened this year—if it were a novel, I would say that it

John le Carré—author of Cold War novels such The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy—has died. Le Carré, whose real name was David John Moore Cornwell, studied at Oxford, worked undercover for British intelligence, and created one of the best-known fictional spies of all time, George Smiley.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s final book, Justice, Justice Thou Shalt Pursue: A Life’s Work Fighting for a More Perfect Union, cowritten with Amanda L. Tyler, will be published by University of California Press in March.

The New York Times culture desk has announced that it has given

Friends, editors, and readers mourn the unexpected loss of fiction writer Anthony Veasna So, who died this week at age twenty-eight. So had published stories in n+1, the New Yorker, and Granta, and his debut collection, Afterparties, is forthcoming this summer.

At The Nation, Billie Allen writes about his friend Brandon Bernard, the ninth inmate to be executed since the Justice Department ended a seventeen-year moratorium on capital punishments in July. There are at least four more executions scheduled before Inauguration day. For more on Bernard’s case, see E. Tammy Kim’s New Yorker piece

After Louise Glück won the Nobel Prize, her agent found her a new Spanish-language publisher. Now the poet’s original imprint, Pre-Textos, is calling for Glück to return: “We want some kind of justice for 14 years of loyalty to an author who was almost completely unknown. . . . For years, we have lost money with pleasure, in the name of promoting great poetry and a wonderful author.”

At the Paris Review Daily, Lucy Scholes revisits the work of Danish author Tove Ditlevsen. Ditlevsen’s Copenhagen Trilogy will be reissued in January by FSG. As Scholes writes, “the trilogy tells the story of

At The Undefeated, a list of can’t-miss books from 2020. As Soraya Nadia McDonald writes, it hasn’t been the best year for reading: “This list is, in part, an acknowledgement of the way 2020 wrecked our attention spans with its nonstop ghastliness. As such, it’s filled with selections that perform small miracles.” The picks include Claudia Rankine’s Just Us, James McBride’s Deacon King Kong, and African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song, edited by Kevin Young.

Allegra Hobbs looks at the history of the modern advice column and how the pandemic “seems to have accelerated this need

At the New Republic Jennifer Wilson looks at Sometimes You Have to Lie, a biography of Louise Fitzhugh, the author of Harriet the Spy. As Wilson notes, Fitzhugh was a lesbian children’s-book author in the era of the McCarthy hearings, conformity, and homophobia. She hung out with Djuna Barnes and Lorraine Hansberry and refused to do interviews, readings, or publicity. Her second novel, about a lesbian relationship, was quietly shelved.

The winners of the Whiting Foundation’s Creative Nonfiction Grant have been announced.

At BuzzFeed News, a look at the year in disinformation. Looking at lies

At the New York Times, Laura Cappelle reports on the debate over French author Emmanuel Carrère’s new memoir-novel, Yoga. He writes, in the final pages, about his ex-wife Hélène Devynck—which, she says, violates a legal agreement that he not present her as a character in his books without her consent. Carrère claims that he did not break the agreement: the passage in question is a quote from an earlier book, his memoir Lives Other Than My Own, in which Devynck features prominently. Yoga has sold more than 200,000 copies in France, and will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US.

The editor of Wired, Nicholas Thompson, has been chosen as the new CEO of The Atlantic.

At the London Review of Books, Andrew O’Hagan reviews the new Don DeLillo novel, The Silence. O’Hagan writes that DeLillo “has been a catastrophist for so long that we only really get excited when life’s catastrophes go way beyond his predictions.”

Imani Perry’s new book, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, will be published in June by Ecco.

Akwaeke Emezi will have their first book of poetry published by Copper Canyon Press in 2022.

Betsy Wade, the first

The Guardian reports on the reopening of UK bookstores after the lockdown. With the holiday season approaching, the next few weeks could be critical to the survival of many small shops.

The Columbia Journalism Review talks to science writers, editors, and reporters about the lessons journalists can take away from the pandemic. It’s not all negative: as The Atlantic’s Ed Yong points out, there has been a resurgence of quality longform pieces: “Editorially, when we’re given the time and space to swing big without chasing short-term goals, it has really paid off.”

New York Times’s critics Dwight

Lux, a new magazine “of feminism for the masses” named for socialist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, will launch in January 2021. The first issue will feature “intimate portraits of intellectuals like Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and organizers like K Toyin Agbebiyi, reports from feminist struggles from Mexico to Egypt, explorations of the politics of pleasure from Soviet perfume to socialist sex radicals, and glimpses into the deep archive of socialist feminist thought.”

ReedPop’s publishing trade shows BookExpo, BookCon, and Unbound will not be held in the new year, after being canceled in 2020.

Verso Books staff has organized to join a unit of the NewsGuild. In a statement released yesterday, the publisher announced that management has voluntarily recognized the union. At Literary Hub, editor Ben Mabie and senior publicist Julia Judge discuss the unionizing process.

Jewish Currents is adding a “new and growing” Advisory Board to its masthead, including novelist Deborah Eisenberg, scholars Cornel West and Judith Butler, and journalist Kate Aronoff.

NPR’s Book Concierge has been updated with 2020 titles.

CUNY’s Black Media Initiative has launched a directory of American media