Lynne Tillman Former Details editor Dan Peres has been hired as the editor in chief of the new Gawker.com. Peres told the New York Times that the site won’t try to emulate the style of the original Gawker. “In the later years they probably took things too far. . . . There was a lot of gratuitous meanness and sort of misguided decision-making,” Peres said. “There’s an opportunity to draw on the great things that they did and dismiss some of the not-great things that they did.” Vulture has confirmed that André Aciman’s sequel to Call Me by Your

Tressie McMillan Cottom The New York Times remembers Rachel Ingalls, the recently-rediscovered author of Mrs. Caliban, who died earlier this month. Around the time New Directions began republishing her books in 2017, Ingalls also received a diagnosis of terminal cancer. But according to her sister, Sarah Daughn, “the diagnosis had an unexpected effect” on the author and Ingalls “began to enjoy the recognition that had long eluded her.” “She was so happy,” Daughn told the Times in an interview. “She was getting to say everything she wanted to say. Jennifer Finney Boylan has sold a new book to Celadon.

Tommy Orange

Ottessa Moshfegh The shortlist for the 2019 Wellcome Prize has been announced. Nominees include Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Thomas Page McBee’s Amateur, among others. “They ask difficult questions . . . they blend personal with scientific research, cultural with historical, they are very creative,” judging chair Elif Shafak said of the six shortlisted books. “And these voices are very honest. They are unflinching, very candid, even when they’re across difficult subjects.” The winner will be announced in May. Journalist and The Everything Store author Brad Stone is working on a new book about Amazon.

Marlon James The 2019 Windham-Campell Awards have been announced. Danielle McLaughlin and David Chariandy have won for fiction; Raghu Karnad and Rebecca Solnit for nonfiction; Ishion Hutchinson and Kwame Dawes for poetry; and Young Jean Lee and Patricia Cornelius for drama. Each author will receive $165,000. W.S. Merwin, the former U.S. Poet Laureate who won two Pulitzers and a National Book Award, has died at ninety-one. In an interview at Desert Island Discs, Marlon James, author of Black Leopard, Red Wolf, recalls his struggles growing up gay in Jamaica. When he was young, he wanted to not be gay

David Haskell. Photo: Marvin Orellana The National Book Critics Circle has announced its 2018 awards. Among the winners are Anna Burns (fiction) for Milkman, Steve Coll (nonfiction) for Directorate S, Zadie Smith (criticism) for Feel Free, and Ada Limon (poetry) for The Carrying. Maureen Corrigan of NPR’s Fresh Air took home the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, and Arte Público Press, the largest publisher of Hispanic literature in the US, was presented with the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award. At the Columbia Journalism Review, a podcast featuring Adam Moss, the soon-to-be-former editor of New York magazine, in

Olga Tokarczuk The longlist for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize has been announced. Nominees include Annie Ernaux’s The Years, Can Xue’s Love in the New Millennium, Samanta Schweblin’s Mouthful of Birds, and Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. The shortlist will be announced in April, and the winner revealed in May. Alicia Keys is writing a memoir. More Myself will be published by Oprah Winfrey’s Flatiron Books imprint, An Oprah Book, in November. The winners of this year’s Windham-Campbell Prizes have been announced. Honorees include Rebecca Solnit, Danielle McLaughlin, and Kwame Dawes. Lit

Namwali Serpell. Photo: Peg Korpinski At Popula, Mik Awake reflects on the inherent disappointment of “owning many books.” After finally purchasing his own copy of The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, a book that he had checked out from his high school library over and over, Awake writes that he instantly felt he had made a mistake. “Owning it could not recapture the electricity of that reading experience, nor deepen my personal claim,” he writes. “Instead of my past, these books only conjure visions of the inevitable future, of the day when I will be dead, and someone else

Joni Mitchell The Guardian reports that in the last two years, political book sales have doubled. Although “many of last year’s strong sellers dealt with Donald Trump . . . readers were also seeking more classic fare” like Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto and George Orwell’s Notes on Nationalism.

Margo Jefferson Elton John, who is currently on what he says will be his final tour, has announced that he has finished his autobiography, which will be published on October 15. According to John, “My life has been one helluva roller coaster ride and I’m now ready to tell you my story, in my own words.” Henry Holt, the musician’s publisher, is calling the book “no holds barred.” At The Cut, Anna Sillman interviews the Pulitzer-winning critic Margo Jefferson, who in 2006 released the critical study On Michael Jackson. Now that she’s seen the HBO documentary Leaving Neverland, she

Akwaeke Emezi. Photo: Elizabeth Wirija Lambda Literary has announced the finalists for this year’s Lammy awards. Nominees include Sarah Schulman’s Maggie Terry, Édouard Louis’s History of Violence, and Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater. Winners will be announced at a ceremony in June. The Paris Review has announced the winners of this year’s Plimpton and Terry Southern Prizes. Kelli Jo Ford has won the Plimpton Prize for her story “Hybrid Vigor,” and Benjamin Nugent has won the Terry Southern Prize for his story “Safe Spaces.” The awards will be presented at the magazine’s Spring Revel in April. The 2019 Bancroft prize has

Jessica Hopper. Photo: David Sampson Slate has chosen longtime New York magazine editor Jared Hohlt as the website’s new editor in chief. Hohlt had previously worked at Slate as an editorial assistant at the beginning of his career. “It was a journalistic training ground for me,” he told the New York Times. “I’ve been living on a biweekly rhythm for a long time now and I’m excited for a whole new rhythm to work with.” Jessica Hopper has sold a new book to Farrar, Straus and Giroux. No God But Herself: How Women Changed Music in 1975 will be

Richard Powers There will be two Nobel Prizes in Literature awarded this October, the New York Times reports. Last year’s prize was cancelled due to “a scandal involving sexual abuse, accusations of financial wrongdoing and hints of a cover-up” within the Swedish Academy. The finalists for this year’s PEN/Faulkner Award have been announced. Nominees include Richard Powers’s The Oberstory, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s Call Me Zebra, and Blanche McCrary Boyd’s Tomb of the Unknown Racist. The winner will be announced in April. Blockchain journalism start-up Civil is relaunching its token sale today. Poynter’s Rick Edmonds explains how the

Akwaeke Emezi. Photo: Elizabeth Wirija The longlist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction has been announced. Nominees include Anna Burns’s Milkman, Tayari Jones’s An American Marriage, Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive, and Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater. A federal judge ruled last week that Stephen Elliott cannot sue Shitty Media Men list creator Moira Donegan for emotional distress, but that he can continue with his defamation suit. Former British Vogue editor Emily Sheffield is developing “a news startup based around Instagram stories.” The project, #ThisMuchIKnow, is funded by The Guardian’s venture capital fund, BuzzFeed News reports. Elle profiles New Yorker writer

Rowan Ricardo Phillips Rowan Ricardo Phillips, a poet and the author of The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey, has won the 2019 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing. Philip Roth’s Upper West Side apartment just went on the market for $3.2 million. At the New Republic, Josephine Livingstone writes about James Lasdun’s new novel Afternoon of a Faun, and wonders: “Can a man write a great #MeToo novel?” Electric Lit has interviewed George Saunders about his experiences of contributing to the New Yorker. At first, he says, he didn’t know what he was doing: “They sent me a really nice

Layli Long Sponsorship of the Booker Prize has been taken over by Crankstart, a charitable foundation run by Michael Moritz and Harriet Heyman. The Man group, an investment firm that had funded the prize for the past eighteen years, will cease its involvement with the literary award in June. Crankstart has a five-year exclusive contract that can be renewed for a further five years.  New York magazine’s The Cut has started publishing literary fiction on the site. A new story will appear on The Cut every month. New York has been expanding literary content across its sister platforms—in September,

Edouard Louis Literary Hub reports on Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a former detainee at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and author of the bestselling book Guantanamo Diary. After being held for fourteen years without being charged with a crime, Slahi was released to his home country, Mauritania, in 2016, but is now unable to get a passport. Slahi says of his circumstances: “This is hard to understand because it’s so weird. . . . I need my freedom. I need it now.” Philip Roth’s Upper West Side apartment is up for sale. The asking price is $3.2 million. Gary Cohn,

Geoff Dyer The Seattle Weekly will cease its print publication after forty-two years, becoming online-only after the last edition hits newsstands today. The closing comes sixteen months after the Weekly laid off most of the staff in an effort to become profitable again. Josh O’Connor, the president of the publication’s parent company, Sound Publishing, explained the decision in a letter to readers: “Under Sound Publishing, Seattle Weekly tried to continue an emphasis on features and lifestyle topics that would appeal to younger readers, but this, unfortunately, came right at a time when ‘younger’ readers were abandoning print.” Without the

Helen Oyeyemi. Photo: Tom Pilston The New York Review of Books has chosen two new editors to replace Ian Buruma, who left the magazine five months ago. NYRB senior editor Gabriel Winslow-Yost will co-edit the publication with current New Yorker managing editor Emily Greenhouse. Regular contributor Daniel Mendelsohn will take on the new role of editor at large. PEN America has created a new award for performance writing. Playwright Kenneth Lonergan will be the first recipient of the PEN/Mike Nichols Writing for Performance Award. The Washington Post has created a new fellowship in honor of Jamal Khashoggi. The program

Natasha Wimmer Last night, James Baldwin became the top trending search on Google worldwide, up 3,400 percent, after Regina King won best supporting actress for her role in If Beale Street Could Talk, which was based on Baldwin’s novel of the same name. W.E.B. Griffin, the author of dozens of bestselling spy and war novels, has died at eighty-nine. According to Griffin, he wrote more than 150 books, but as the New York Times points out: “Determining the exact number of books he wrote is not so easily done. . . . He was a ghostwriter for many, and