Poets & Writers has created a COVID-19 Relief Fund to offer emergency assistance to writers affected by the pandemic. The first round of funding will provide eighty writers with grants of up to $1,000.

Condé Nast is cutting salaries of all employees making over $100,000 and will reduce hours for other staff, the New York Times reports.

At Literary Hub, Jenny Odell and Wendy Liu discuss technology, our current political moment, and the similarities between their respective recent books, How to Do Nothing and Abolish Silicon Valley. “We have to hope that there is a future beyond the horizon of

After more than a decade of silence, the New York Ghost—the literary newsletter created by novelist Ed Park—has reappeared with a new issue, featuring original work by Ling Ma, Julia Kardon, Lucas Adams, and Courtney Dodson.

The legendary Bay Area bookseller City Lights, currently closed due to the coronavirus, was on the verge of closing for good. But then customers donated more than $365,000 in a single day.

David Quammen—author of the excellent 2012 book Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic as well as a study of Ebola—has sold a book about COVID-19 to Simon & Schuster.

This year’s Guggenheim Fellows were announced yesterday. Literary Hub has a list of all the writers who received a grant this year, including Rebecca Mead, Yiyun Li, Sigrid Nunez, and more.

Italian publishers and writers are rushing to publish books about the country’s coronavirus epidemic. Some authors, like essayist Paolo Giordano, wrote books in less than a month, while others have added new chapters and moved up publication dates for books that were scheduled to come out later this year. “Italy is a laboratory. Think of the singalongs from the balconies or the celebrities’ concerts on

Nadxieli Nieto is joining Flatiron as an editor at large. Formerly the PEN America literary awards program director, Nieto will focus on literary fiction, nonfiction, and young adult literature by Latinx and BIPoC authors.

At Jewish Currents, Mairav Zonszein talks to writers and editors who have been affected by COVID-19. “When you work in media and people start talking about a recession, you know that’s not good news for the industry,” said Brandy Jensen, an editor who was recently laid off with the rest of the staff at The Outline. “The paradox of how media is funded is that traffic numbers

The shortlist for the 2020 Dylan Thomas Prize was announced yesterday. Nominees include Bryan Washington’s Lot, Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, and Téa Obreht’s Inland. The winner will be announced in May.

The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded $22 million in grants. Funded projects include a dictionary of Choctaw dialects, a documentary about public libraries, and a study of responses to the 1918 influenza epidemic in Europe.

The Pulitzer Prize Board has postponed the announcement of this year’s winners. Administrator Dana Canedy explained the decision in a

This month, The Atlantic has set a new traffic record for their website, with eighty-seven million unique pageviews, which is more than double than their previous high mark. The magazine also had thirty-six thousand new subscribers over the past four weeks.

The 2020 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction has been given to Chloe Aridjis for her novel Sea Monsters. The other finalists were: Yiyun Li’s Where Reasons End, Peter Rock’s The Night Swimmers, Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s We Cast a Shadow, and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. The authors will be honored in a video that will be released

Actor and writer Patricia Bosworth has died from complications caused by the coronavirus. She was eighty-six. Her books include the memoir Anything Your Little Heart Desires and biographies of Diane Arbus, Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda, and Montgomery Clift.

Wild author Cheryl Strayed has started a great new weekly podcast called Sugar Calling. “Each week, Cheryl will call a writer she admires in search of insight and courage,” says the New York Times. “She’s turning to some of the most prolific writers of our time—all over the age of 60—to ask the questions on all our minds: How do we stay calm

On But That’s Another Story, Will Schwalbe talks to Min Jin Lee about growing up in Queens, how George Eliot inspired her writing, and her new book, Free Food for Millionaires. “George Eliot’s attitude is, if you don’t know, you have to look it up,” she explained. “And I think in a way, her audacity and her brazenness has given me kind of a courage to use Korean words in my work, which I think are worth becoming loan words in English.”

Folio has collected a list of resources for freelance journalists, including organizations offering grants and lists of publications accepting pitches.

Kate

The International Booker Prize shortlist was released this morning. Nominees include Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s The Discomfort of Evening, Yoko Ogowa’s The Memory Police, and Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season. The winner will be announced in May.

The judges for the 2020 National Book Awards were announced yesterday. Judges include Roxane Gay, Rebecca Makkai, Terry Tempest Williams, and John Darnielle, who Literary Hub notes is likely “the first ever bonafide rock star judge” in the awards’ history.

PEN America is relaunching the Writers’ Emergency Fund. Grants from $500 to $1,000 are available

Wow, No Thank You author Samantha Irby tells Literary Hub about late night writing, Gone Girl, and who she wants to read her book. “If I am being honest, and completely vulnerable, I would say that I hope that people I used to be friends with, people I was very close to with whom I shared big parts of my life and whose friendships I squandered or fucked up or ruined in some way, I hope that those handful of people have maybe read something I’ve written and seen that I turned out okay,” she said. “Not even in a shitty way, but genuinely in a ‘look at this thing I made, I hope you like it, I miss

“Bookstores are the kind of lifelines that often go unnoticed, are underestimated, are underutilized. We serve ideas and people. Ideas and people. We are so much more than just commerce,” writes Lucy Kogler. “And that is why once this crisis is contained, over, something… we will—with the help of the government—be able to rebound.”

The winners of this year’s Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards were announced yesterday. Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift won the fiction prize, Charles King’s Gods of the Upper Air won the nonfiction prize, Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic won the poetry prize, and Eric Foner

On Friday, Powell’s Books, which laid off most of its workers earlier this month, has rehired more than one hundred employees to help meet the demands created by an upsurge in online book sales.

Meg LaBorde Kuehn, the CEO of Kirkus Media, has written an open letter announcing that digital subscriptions to Kirkus magazine are now free. “Our mandate, now and always, is simple: help our community of book lovers discover the best new reads and stay ahead of the curve.”

As bookstores close, authors cancel book tours, conferences get delayed (Book Expo America), or canceled (the American Library