The Authors Guild and the National Book Critics Circle have written an open letter to newspapers and other media companies, encouraging “those outlets to continue to make space for the vital conversation around books in their coverage.” “Strong literary arts coverage not only benefits authors, but nourishes the entire literary ecosystem, including freelance reviewers, publishers, bookstores, libraries, literary agencies, editors, designers and everyone who contributes in one way or another to the world of books.”

Ben Smith, the New York Times’ media columnist, questions Pulitzer Prize–winning

This year’s Dylan Thomas Prize has been awarded to Bryan Washington’s short story collection, Lot.

Nieman Lab’s Sarah Scire talks to Atlantic executive editor Adrienne LaFrance about conspiracy theories and her recent reporting about QAnon. “Often we encounter absurdities and the impulse can be to wave it away and say, ‘Okay, if we ignore that thing that seems harmful or ridiculous, eventually it’ll peter out.’ But that was also something that people said about birtherism and now Donald Trump is the president. Anyone who can agree that conspiracy theories are harmful for democratic society

Netflix is working with Italian production company Fandango to adapt Elena Ferrante’s latest novel, The Lying Life of Adults, into a streaming series. In other adaptation news, Apple TV+ and Sofia Coppola are working on a limited series based on Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country.

Columbia Journalism Review’s MSNBC public editor Maria Bustillos questions the network’s choice to report on the use of remdesivir to treat COVID-19 without investigating the reasons behind its promotion. “It’s not unreasonable for Dr. Fauci and other scientific researchers to express optimism—to be what you

Simon & Schuster publisher and CEO Carolyn Reidy died yesterday at the age of seventy-one. Reidy had been with the company for almost twenty years, and worked with writers from Hillary Clinton to Jennifer Weiner. “Carolyn was a literary giant, a leader who artfully navigated the upheavals of publishing to amplify a wide range of voices reflective of our lived world,” PEN America president Jennifer Egan remembered. “Carolyn believed in every story she touched, and ushered our works into the wider world with passion, care, and decades of expertise.”

Haruki Murakami is hosting a radio show during

Nieman Lab’s Laura Hazard Owen talks to The 19th cofounder Emily Ramshaw about launching the news site in the middle of a pandemic and why political reporting is more important than ever. The nonprofit news site was announced in January and will still be launched this summer. “For us, the primary obsession this summer and into the fall will be the politics of the pandemic and what that means for women — deeply exploring the ways in which women are disproportionately affected by this moment, which may be a heck of a lot longer than a moment,” Ramshaw explained. “It became abundantly clear that

Every morning, Robert Caro gets up early, works on the fifth and final volume of his massive Lyndon B. Johnson biography, and walks through Central Park. “He’s in a moment of crisis,” Caro says of the late-career LBJ that will be covered in this volume of the biography. “I’m trying to show in this section of this book what it’s like to be president of the United States when everything is going wrong.” The book is highly anticipated. “As great as his [Caro’s] earlier books have been, this is the culmination, the one many of us have been waiting for,” the journalist-historian David Maraniss told

The 2020 Jackson Poetry Prize has been awarded to Ed Roberson. “This is an extraordinary time to be awarding this significant prize in poetry, a momentous time in our recent history, a time of panic, fear, uncertainty and inner turmoil, and devastating tragedy where people are separated from one another, cannot even touch or bury loved ones, and yet are bound together inextricably by their vulnerability as humans,” the judges said in a press release. “Poetry such as Ed Roberson’s troubles these meditations, these issues, these apocalyptic queries in innovative expressive ways.”

Over half of

The PEN America World Voices festival is moving online. Podcasts, videos, interviews, and other live events on the theme of “These Truths” will be available on the groups website over the next few weeks. “In an era when the agreed-upon factual basis of our daily news is constantly undermined, there has never been a greater need for us to hear the deeper truths afforded by literature,” they said. “This virtual edition of America’s premier international literary festival will engage with contested histories and memory, challenge the fabrications of truth served to us on an almost daily basis,

In France, a page on a government website that purportedly pointed out misinformation about coronavirus in the French media was taken down. The site was removed after the the Syndicat National des Journalists union complained that it was an attack on press freedom.

The union representing newsroom employees of the Tribune Publishing Group—which owns the Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore Sun, the Hartford Courant and many other papers—is trying to unseat two board members representing Alden Global Capital. The hedge fund, which took a 32 percent share in the group in November, is the largest

The winners of this year’s Pulitzer Prizes were announced yesterday. Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys won the prize for fiction, Benjamin Moser’s Sontag won the biography prize, and Anne Boyer’s The Undying and Greg Grandin’s The End of the Myth both won the general nonfiction prize.

Percival Everett tells the New York Times why readers might disagree about the events of his most recent novel, Telephone. Everett and publisher Graywolf released three different versions of the novel, and there’s no way for readers to choose which one they get. “It’s going to piss a lot of people off, I’m

The Pulitzer Prizes—originally scheduled for April 20 but delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic—will be announced today at 3pm EST.

The new Yale Review—the second since its restart with author Meghan O’Rourke as editor—is out now, and features work by Eileen Myles, Jess Row, Jenny Xie, Major Jackson, and others.

Viking has announced that it will publish The Searcher, a new thriller by bestselling author Tana French, on October 6. (At Literary Hub, Emily Temple collects all the information about the book that she can find.) In other book news, the New Yorker’s Jessica Winter, author of Break

Joy Harjo has been named US Poet Laureate for the second time. Harjo plans to spend her second term focusing on creating “a digital interactive map featuring contemporary Native poets, including videos of them reading their work.”

The New York Times’s Gal Beckerman analyzes celebrity bookshelves as they appear in quarantine broadcasts. “A stranger’s collection is to us a window to their soul,” he writes. “We peruse with judgment, sometimes admiration and occasionally repulsion.”

Read an excerpt from Greil Marcus’s new book, Under the Red White and Blue: Patriotism, Disenchantment and the