The finalists for this year’s Lambda Literary Awards were announced yesterday. Nominees include Kristen Arnett’s Mostly Dead Things, Bryan Washington’s Lot, and We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan. The winners will be announced at a ceremony in June.

ProPublica reporter and New York Times Magazine staff writer Pamela Colloff has sold a book to Random House. A Deal With the Devil will tell the story of “America’s most prolific jailhouse informant, Paul Skalnik, the people he damaged on a decades-long crime spree, and the people and institutions that enabled him.”

The National Magazine Awards ceremony has been postponed due to COVID-19 concerns, the New York Post reports. The event, which was scheduled for March 12, will likely be rescheduled for later this spring.

At Literary Hub, Ann Napolitano explains why writers should follow their obsessions. “We are inundated with information every hour of every day, and so it’s entirely possible to go through your life without realizing which subjects, pieces of art, or stories call out to you,” she writes. “If you’re a writer or artist, missing this information will deprive your work. If you’re not a writer or

Kerry Howley, author of the cage-fighting classic Thrown, has written a piece about Elizabeth Warren’s takedown of Michael Bloomberg (“perfect brutality”), and about the thrill that she felt while watching Warren debate. “To watch Warren explain something was to watch someone with a particularly ordered mind, capable of seizing upon a narrow question, zooming out and carrying you concisely along a set of interlocking forces,” Howley writes. “Even when you didn’t agree, you could marvel at the fluidity with which she engaged the logic of the worldview. The system may be rigged, but she can untie

At Literary Hub, Jessi Jezewska Stevens reflects on the passive protagonist. “Passive protagonists can ruin things for any number of reasons. They resist and retard drama. They lack motivation. They’re weak. . . . There’s perhaps a special danger in writing a passive woman, a trope that rests on centuries of male underestimation of the weaker sex,” she writes. “Even still, I feel motivated to make at least half an argument for the passive, lazy lead, who, despite the wisdom of popular craft, I also find uniquely useful for cutting through the bullshit of a very troubled world.”

“Anyone who

At Literary Hub, Kristin Iversen talks to Hilary Leichter about capitalism, the gig economy, and what inspired her to write her new novel, Temporary. “I was teaching in an undergraduate program, and I was tutoring five different people, and I had a temp job during the day. . . . I realized that everyone around me was sort of in this same position and we were all just spending all of our time racing around—for what? We were just trying to stay afloat,” she explained. “I wrote it before the election in 2016, and then I edited it after the election. And it’s like that saying, ‘Write drunk, edit

The winners of this year’s PEN America awards were announced earlier this week. Yiyun Li’s Where Reasons End won the Jean Stein Book Award, Mimi Lok won the Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection, and Brandon Shimoda’s The Grave on the Wall was awarded the Open Book Award.

The PEN/Faulkner award finalists were announced yesterday. The nominees are Chloe Aridjis’s Sea Monsters, Yiyun Li’s Where Reason Ends, 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 winner will be announced in May.

The New

The longlist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction was announced yesterday. Nominees include Angie Cruz’s Dominicana, Jenny Offill’s Weather, Jacqueline Woodson’s Red at the Bone, and Candice Carty-Williams’s Queenie. The winner will be announced in June.

Former Esquire fiction editor Tylor Cabot has launched a new website that uses fiction to reflect on real-world events. The Chronicles of Now will publish short fiction by writers like Carmen Maria Machado, Weike Wang, and Colum McCann that will “be an entry point into the social and political issues they examine,” Literary Hub explains.

Stephen

The Nicaraguan poet, priest, and revolutionary soldier Ernesto Cardenal has died.

A production of Help, Claudia Rankine’s play about white privilege, will open at The Shed next week.

Samanth Subramanian, the author of This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War, reports on India’s new “citizenship law,” Trump’s visit with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and the violence that resulted in at least thirty-eight deaths in Delhi last week.

Publisher’s Weekly offers a glimpse of how the coronavirus could disrupt the book business.

Meanwhile, some pockets of publishing are thriving on the

Elisa Gabbert, poet and author of the collections The Word Pretty and The Self Unstable, will replace David Orr as the New York Times Book Review’s poetry columnist. Gabbert’s first column for the paper will appear next week.

At Nieman Lab, Hanaa’ Tameez looks at a new study conducted by the Center for Media Engagement examining how including reporters’ bios with the stories they write might influence reader engagement and trust. Apparently, it does not: “But as it turns out, your readers…don’t much care.” The study advises newsrooms to use bios “in conjunction with trust-building strategies

Mahogany L. Browne talks with Literary Hub about a new collection of Audre Lorde’s essays and speeches, Sister Outsider: “I have found Black authors constantly fueled by Lorde’s work but also diminished when they find their ‘allies’ aren’t as familiar with Lorde as they are of, say Foucault. And so, I see a constant effort of leveling the playing field (culturally, economically and socially) resulting in a fractured mindset of ‘wokeness’ and well-meaning folks.”

At The Cut, Emily Gould writes about working for Gawker in the late-2000s, and revisits the time she was shamed on television by

Ariana Reines has won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for her new collection, A Sand Book. Discussing her work with Sasha Frere-Jones for Bookforum last winter, Reines observed, “People have different kinds of understandings of form and structure and accuracy. This is especially true of an art like poetry, which is so liquid. It can be about anything, it can take any form, and you don’t have to pay anybody for equipment.”

At Poynter, Mel Grau details the nearly two-year fight at the Boston Globe for a better family-leave policy. Six women journalists led the effort, which ultimately granted

A partnership between Report for America and the Native American Journalists Association will support nineteen reporters covering indigenous issues this year. As Neiman Lab points out, less than one half of one percent of journalists are Native. Professor Joseph Pierce outlines an approach for being an effective reporter in Native communities: “You build trust through listening and through recognizing other people’s knowledge. . . Talking with elders about history is history. It’s not like some tall tale. It’s not an opinion. Granting communities agency over their own stories has really broad