How to Be an Artist author Jerry Saltz explains how to channel stress into creativity. “Never, ever think about creating something good. Good is boring,” he told the New York Times’s Elisabeth Egan. “Ninety-five percent of what I write is crapola and I just cut it to find the 5 percent that might be worth putting out into the world. You have to open up and pursue that kind of radical vulnerability.”

Thirty thousand people have joined Patreon as creators in the last three weeks.

Jordan Kisner shares what she’s reading during quarantine. “My reading list is filled, for the moment, with books

The 2020 Whiting Award winners were announced yesterday. Andrea Lawlor, Ling Ma, and Genevieve Sly Crane won for fiction, while Jacquira Díaz and Jia Tolentino won for nonfiction.

On the Reading Women podcast, Kendra Winchester talks to Emily St. John Mandel about ghost stories, crime fiction, and her new book, The Glass Hotel. Mandel originally set out to write a novel based on the crimes of Bernie Madoff, but the narrative shifted as she wrote. “When I sent an early draft of this novel to my agent a couple of years ago, one of the questions for her was, ‘Are there too many ghosts?’ Because

The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post have signed an open letter to the Chinese government asking them to reconsider their decision to remove American journalists. “This move — made in retaliation for recent expulsions by the United States government — is one that we would protest under any circumstances,” they wrote. “But it is uniquely damaging and reckless as the world continues the struggle to control this disease, a struggle that will require the free flow of reliable news and information.”

The White House Correspondents’ Association has enacted strict social

Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive has won the Rathbones Folio Prize. The Guardian notes that Luiselli is the first women to win the prize in its seven-year history. The awards ceremony was canceled but the prize was presented online via Twitter.

Bloomsbury has bought the rights to David Byrne and Maira Kalman’s American Utopia. Based on Byrne’s Broadway show of the same name, the book will be published next September.

T Kira Madden’s Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls is being adapted into a movie, Deadline reports. “T Kira’s story is a lesson in radical self-acceptance, an

At the New Yorker, author Jia Tolentino (Trick Mirror) talks with Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed) about class inequality in the US, the New York Times’ reporting of the 2008 financial crisis, good versus bad solidarity, the coronavirus, environmental collapse, and the author’s (guarded) hope for the future.

James Fallows, a longtime contributor to The Atlantic and the author of Our Towns and China Airborne, has started a list of writers and people in the media who have called on news outlets to “please stop live coverage” of Trump’s “briefings,” which are “49% misinformation and evasion

The recipients of this year’s Windham Campbell Prizes were announced yesterday. Winners include Yiyun Li, Namwali Serpell, and Anne Boyer.

Lucie Elven has sold a new book to Soft Skull. The Weak Spot “follows an unnamed narrator’s arrival in a remote European town to apprentice under the enigmatic man who runs the town’s pharmacy, and examines ideas about narrative, language, power, prescriptions, cures, and women’s bodies.”

For The Ringer, Jane Hu explains why Ling Ma’s 2018 novel Severance speaks to our current moment.

NiemanLab looks at how coronavirus and social distancing is affecting

The Personality Brokers author Merve Emre has sold a new book. Doubleday has bought the rights to Woman: The History of an Idea, which details “a history of womanhood as it’s been defined by literature, philosophy, science, and culture across the ages.”

Min Jin Lee, Kiley Reid, Victor LaValle and more discuss the books they turn to for comfort.

Hilary Leichter, Celia Laskey, Emily Nemens, and other debut authors are exploring new ways to promote their books at a time when book tours and in-person interviews are impossible.

Independent bookstore owners talk to the New York Times about the

Rick Atkinson’s The British Are Coming has won the New-York Historical Society’s Barbara and David Zalaznick Book Prize.

New York’s McNally Jackson bookstores have temporarily laid off almost eighty employees. Staff will be paid through the week and receive health care for the rest of the month.

Literary Hub has published its first list of ways to support independent publishers and booksellers.

At the Washington Post, Paul Farhi and Sarah Ellison examine Fox News’s changing coverage of the coronavirus pandemic.

Sloane Crosley reflects on the impulse to write during emergencies and tragedy.

“These stories we make, these books we read… What do they amount to in the presence of suffering?” asks Literary Hub editor in chief Johnny Diamond. “The answer has always been the same, in good times and in bad: books are how we bear witness to life, even as they divert us from its darkest days.” The website plans to point readers to ways to support independent bookstores and authors, and is also offering personalized book recommendations.

PEN America has cancelled this year’s World Voices Festival due to COVID-19, which was supposed to take place in early May. The organization plans to

Mark Sarvas, author of the novel Memento Park, is launching the Decameron Reading Series, a website that will feature video and audio recordings of authors reading their work. He’s starting it for “friends whose bookstore events have been canceled,” but if the site is successful, he says he will “gladly do the same for any writers who have canceled tours.” Sarvas adds: “It’s a safe way to help get the word out for these worthy titles, and gives us all something literary and fun to do while we are cooped up at home. If you have a book and a canceled tour or appearance, please feel free to message

The National Book Critics Circle Award winners were announced last night. Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments won the prize for criticism, Morgan Parker’s Magical Negro won for poetry, and Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House won the John Leonard Prize. A ceremony that was originally scheduled for tonight at the New School will now be held in September due to COVID-19.

The American Academy of Arts and Letters has announced the winners of this year’s prizes. Honorees include Valeria Luiselli, Wayne Koestenbaum, Alex Kotlowitz, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Mary Ruefle, among others.

For Ssense, Thessaly La Force talks to Cathy Park Hong about poetry, Richard Pryor, and her new essay collection, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. Hong said that her “obsession” with Pryor’s comedy was part of the inspiration for her book. “I have never been able to directly and honestly write about race,” she said. “I thought, how can I write honestly about race that feels as immediate and urgent and real as what Richard Pryor was doing with stand-up comedy?” A poet by training, Hong landed on the essay form, which does similar work to stand-up. “With comedy, you’re making an