Tana French has announced a new novel. The Searcher, which follows a retired detective living in Ireland who returns to work “when a local kid alerts him to his brother’s disappearance,” will be published by Viking in October. French tells Entertainment Weekly that she was inspired to write the new book by her last novel, The Witch Elm. “So much of it was about what was going on inside the narrator’s head. . . . The character in The Witch Elm just goes through this arc from being the golden boy to being a wreck,” she said. “I didn’t want to write that again.”

Former New York Times Shanghai

At The Ringer, an appreciation of the late True Grit author Charles Portis: “His novels are marvelous odysseys into the dark heart of WTF.”

After a public backlash, the media company Axios has decided to return its Paycheck Protection Program loan, a federal grant designed to help small businesses avoid layoffs. According to cofounder Jim VandeHei, Axios is close to completing a deal for an “alternative source of capital.” VandeHei explained: “The program has become divisive, turning into a public debate about the worthiness of specific industries or companies. . . . While applying for the

A previously unpublished novel by Simone de Beauvoir will be released in France this fall and in the US next year. Beauvoir worked on The Inseparables for a few months in 1954 and then abandoned the project when Jean-Paul Sartre said it was no good. Toril Moi, author of Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman, told the New York Times why she thinks Beauvoir never finished the book: “Why did she so readily agree with Sartre? I don’t think it’s the prose. . . . She judged it insignificant because it was not political.”

A look at how daily newspaper cartoonists are handling the

Today at 12pm EST, as part of Pandemonium U, Benjamin Moser, the author of Sontag and Why This World, will participate in a conversation titled “How to Write a Biography” with author Pamela Druckerman (There Are No Grown-Ups Around). Among the questions he will address: “What’s it like to be a man who writes about women? Why are women’s life stories different from those of men? How does Ben choose his subjects, and what’s it like to spend years immersed in their diaries and emails?” Anyone can “attend” using Zoom.

Sarah Manguso, author of Ongoingness and 300 Arguments, has sold her first novel

The New York Times will stop printing the “Travel” and “Sports” sections in their Sunday edition. The paper is starting a new “At Home” supplement, a lifestyle section for the quarantined. A note to staff from executive editor Dean Baquet and managing editor Joseph Kahn said, “The extraordinary nature of this moment has driven remarkable changes in our journalism. . . . It has also caused us to rethink the way we produce traditional elements of the news report and, in particular, the structure of the print newspaper.”

On Literary Hub’s Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast, V.V. Ganeshananthan and

The staff of Wired has unionized with NewsGuild of New York, the Daily Beast reports. Employees had been organizing for over a year and decided to move forward with the union after parent company Condé Nast announced cuts due to the COVID-19 pandemic. “If we can preempt the inevitable cuts by even a matter of days and help get laid off workers better severances, or turn some of these layoffs into cuts that are spread across high paid workers’ salaries, or turn them into furloughs, or at least be able to talk about those options, we have a responsibility to do that for the most vulnerable people

The Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist was announced yesterday. The finalists are Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other, Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light, Jenny Offill’s Weather, Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, Natalie Haynes’s A Thousand Ships, and Angie Cruz’s Dominicana. The winner will be announced in September.

Longtime Random House editor Robert Loomis died earlier this week at the age of 93.

Small Press Distribution has started a GoFundMe campaign to make up for lost revenue during the COVID-19 pandemic. “Although it’s true that books can’t help materially, we believe that

Malcolm Harris has sold a new book to Little, Brown. The Ghosts of Palo Alto will be “a mix of California history and memoir” that explores “Harris’s hometown, a national center of wealth accumulation, elite education, and teen suicide” and uncovers “a 150-year legacy of eugenics and mass murder at the foundation of Silicon Valley.”

The Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize shortlist was announced yesterday. Finalists include Tishani Doshi’s Small Days and Nights, Elif Shafak’s 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, and Robert Macfarlane’s Underland. The winner will be announced

Riverhead Books has started a new online author series called “I’m Glad You Asked.” The first episode allows you to eavesdrop on a phone call between Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror, and Brit Bennett, whose novels include The Mothers and The Vanishing Half, which is due out in June.

The LA Times Book Prizes have been announced.

An archive of Ariana Reines’s inspired project "Rilking"—in which the poet and a number of readers gathered on Zoom to explore the mysterious reaches of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies—is now available online.

Colm Tóibín recommends six of his favorite books

An adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex has been announced by Paramount Television Studios. Fifty Shades of Grey director Sam Taylor-Johnson will direct the project. Eugenides’s 2002 novel has been making the rounds in Hollywood for more than a decade, after a much-hyped 2009 HBO series never came to fruition.

At Literary Hub, an interview with Thom Stead, the man behind the Instagram account Read Books, Serve Looks.

Lambda Literary has championed LGBTQ voices in the literary community for thirty-plus years. While their annual awards, the Lammys, will still be announced online this

At the New York Times, Lauren Christensen talks to Ottessa Moshfegh about loss, the need to be liked, and her upcoming book, Death in Her Hands. “People don’t want to talk about how they relate to a character’s more unsavory qualities,” she said of readers’ reactions to her novels, “so they’re like, ‘God, she was really gross.’ Everybody’s so obsessed with being liked.”

The New York Public Library is listing the top books that New Yorkers are checking out online during the pandemic. Favorite titles include Sally Rooney’s Normal People, James McBride’s Deacon King Kong, and Margaret Atwood’s

See What You Made Me Do, Jess Hill’s study of domestic violence, has won this year’s Stella Prize.

Chelsea Bieker, Maya Shanbhag Lang, Marie Mutsuki Mockett, David Moloney, and TaraShea Nesbit answer the Lit Hub Author Questionnaire. Bieker voiced frustration that many of her Goodreads reviews complained about too many “bad things” happening to her characters. “I will stop writing about the oppression and heinous violence enacted upon women when oppression and heinous violence ceases happening to women,” she said. Mockett said that “age and parenting” have helped her get over the worry that