Ha Jin The winners of the 2017 National Book Award were announced last night. Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing won for fiction, Masha Gessen’s The Future is History won for nonfiction, and Frank Bidart’s Half-light won for poetry. Touchstone is publishing a new short story collection featuring the work of Louise Erdrich, Ha Jin, Walter Mosley, and more. It Occurs to Me That I Am America will be published next January and, according to editor Jonathan Santlofer, “aims to address the anxiety many Americans are feeling about losing the freedoms for which we’ve fought; to remind us of America

Louise Erdrich. Photo: Paul Emmel Doubleday has announced that it will publish Jeffrey Toobin’s next book, which will investigate the scandals of Donald Trump, focusing in particular on the probe by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and on the Congressional inquiries into Trump’s possible collusions with Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign. Toobin, whose previous books include The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court and American Heiress (about Patty Hearst), says, “We’ve been telling this story in bits and pieces for the past year, but I’m hoping to pull it together in single narrative that tells the

Tina Brown At Vox, a group of writers read and evaluated all twenty of the National Book Award finalists for 2017. (The winners will be announced on Wednesday night.) Some of the assessments are mixed: Elliot Ackerman’s Dark at the Crossing is a “compelling if uneven novel.” Frances Fitzgerald’s The Evangelicals is “written dryly, which renders it a little exhausting at times.” At the New Yorker, Nathan Heller captures the editorial flair and era captured in Tina Brown’s Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983-1992. “That time was filled with famous people, endless parties, comic misadventure. But it’s Brown’s reports on editing

Radhika Jones Radhika Jones will be the next editor of Vanity Fair. Jones is replacing Graydon Carter, who announced his retirement this fall after twenty-five years as editor in chief. According to the New York Post, Jones will be taking a significant pay cut: While Carter reportedly made about $2 million dollars a year, Jones is being offered about $500,000. As one Post source put it: “The era of the highly paid Conde Nast editor is truly over.” The Washington Post’s Opinion section with now use artificial intelligence to guide readers to stories with opposing viewpoints from what they’re

Jaron Lanier The Washington Post is launching a new feature to offer new perspectives to its readers. Counterpoint will search opinion articles and link to counterarguments based on what a user is reading at that time. Editorial page editor Fred Hiatt said the tool will not only expose readers to different viewpoints, but also to more Post content. “If you come to read a great column by Charles Krauthammer, would you be interested in a counter argument by Ruth Marcus?” he mused. “If a link to Greg Sargent brought you to our site, would you stick around if you

Adam Gopnik Peter Hamby takes a deep dive into the world of the White House press corps. Hamby writes that the inability of White House correspondents to question press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on inaccuracies and pressure the administration into discussing certain topics is having a detrimental effect on the media’s reputation. “The political press is facing a crisis of substance,” he writes, “and it’s not just poisoning the public’s perception of journalism, it’s playing right into Trump’s hands.” Politico’s Jack Shafer looks at the now-reversed Disney boycott of the Los Angeles Times and explains why Disney, not the

Kevin Young The Library of America announced that it has hired John Kulka to be its new literary director. Kulka—who has held positions at Harvard University Press, Yale University Press, and Basic Books—is replacing editor and author Geoffrey O’Brien, who will conclude his long tenure as LoA’s editor in chief at the end of 2017. Mattress company Casper is launching its own quarterly print magazine. Woolly “encourages readers to relax with a mix of personal essays, comedic advice columns, yoga instructor confessions and much more,” according to Adweek. The New York Times talks to Kevin Young about poetry, hoaxes,

Daniel Mendelsohn The New York Times talks to Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner about his debut novel, Heather, the Totality. Weiner said that although he’d always wanted to write fiction, he wasn’t sure he would ever have the opportunity to do so, and has been shocked by his book’s warm reception in the literary world. “It’s like someone who goes to the casino for the first time and wins,” he said. Rose McGowan’s upcoming memoir will be released in January, one month earlier than planned. Brave will be published in January by Harper One. The Millions talks to An

Donna Brazile Former Democratic National Committee Chair Donna Brazile has come under fire for her new tell-all political memoir Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-Ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House. Brazile has been deeply critical of Hillary Clinton, and in interviews she has called Clinton’s presidential campaign “worse than Hurricane Katrina.” More than 100 former senior aides with Hillary for America responded with a rebuttal to Brazile’s account, proclaiming, among other things, that “It is particularly troubling and puzzling that she would seemingly buy into false Russian-fueled propaganda, spread by both the Russians

Andrew Durbin. Photo: Tag Christoff Local news sites DNAinfo and Gothamist were shut down yesterday by owner Joe Ricketts. The decision comes one week after the New York offices of the company voted to unionize, and will affect 115 employees. In a post on the website, Ricketts wrote that while he was proud of his reporters for covering “tens of thousands of stories that have informed, impacted and inspired millions of people . . . DNAinfo is, at the end of the day, a business, and businesses need to be economically successful if they are to endure.” Condé Nast

Mohsin Hamid. Photo: Jillian Edelstein Michael Oreskes, head of news at NPR, has resigned after multiple women alleged that he sexually assaulted them when he served as the Washington bureau chief of the New York Times. More men have come forward with allegations of sexual assault against actor Kevin Spacey. Deadline speculates that the alleged incidents—which have already halted filming on the upcoming season of House of Cards—might affect Spacey’s biopic about Gore Vidal. Netflix has yet to comment on whether the streaming service will release Gore as scheduled in 2018. The Cut’s Anna Silman talks to Sarah Polley,

Solmaz Sharif. Photo: Arash Saedinia Agatha French reports on the PEN Center USA Literary Awards, held last week in Los Angeles. Winners included Solmaz Sharif’s Look for poetry, Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air for creative nonfiction, and Martin Pousson’s Black Sheep Boy for fiction. Presenter Nick Offerman noted that if anyone wanted to call the president “an incompetent, degenerate boob,” or “a cartoon slug made of Cheeto dust,” that PEN “will fight for your ability to do so.” Bloomberg looks at Facebook’s inability to control the spread of fake news on its social media site. Although the company

Jacqueline Woodson. Photo: Marty Umans Jacqueline Woodson talks to Entertainment Weekly about her new two-book deal with Riverhead. Woodson’s last book, Another Brooklyn, was her first work of adult fiction in twenty years. “I think it’s much harder to write for young people than it is to write for adults,” she said. “You have to go back to that place of being a young person yourself and so many adults have either deliberately forgotten that place (probably because it was too painful a time to hold onto) or they just can’t access it.” The Guardianspeculates on who might be

Philip Roth Why the French love Philip Roth. The Sh*tty Men in Media list began as a private, anonymously crowdsourced document meant to warn women about men who had been accused of sexual harassment. It was, writes Madison Malone Kircher at New York magazine, meant “more as a shield than a weapon.” But that didn’t last long. Though the list has been taken down from Reddit, screenshots are circulating online. “It’s now being leaked and distributed not to protect women from predators but to publicly attack the men on it,” Kircher writes. One person who has sought to “weaponize”

Jennifer Egan The Environmental Protection Agency has accused the New York Times of writing “elitist clickbait trying to attack qualified professionals committed to serving their country.” The comment was in response to Eric Lipton’s story, “Why Has the E.P.A. Shifted on Toxic Chemicals? An Industry Insider Helps Call the Shots.” The spokesperson who sent the message, Liz Bowman, had previously been employed at the American Chemistry Council, a trade association for chemical companies. She told Erik Wemple that she is happy to cooperate with reporters, but feels that Lipton is biased: “There are a lot of reporters at the

Margaret Atwood. Photo: George Whiteside Margaret Atwood’s book Alias Grace will be a Netflix miniseries written and produced by Sarah Polley. The show will premiere on November 3rd and follows the successful adaptation of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which won an Emmy for best drama this year. Atwood told the New York Times, “No one else would’ve asked me to do this but Sarah Polley. . . . Both Sarah and I are interested in what is true and what is not true. I think she liked that a lot of my films have characters crossed with madness. And

James Frey Mother Jones’s Andy Kroll looks into the history of Sinclair Broadcasting, which will be in 72 percent of American households after it buys Tribune Media’s television stations. The company has close ties to the Trump administration and requires their stations to run segments by former Trump staffer Boris Epshteyn. According Kroll, the network’s conservative viewpoints have become more prominent as the company has expanded. Currently, “stations are required to air terrorism alerts daily,” and “responded to criticism of its must-run Boris Epshteyn segments by tripling the number of times stations are mandated to air them each week.”

Joseph O’Neill The bankruptcy of the Alaska News Dispatch should serve as “a cautionary tale that shows the limits of what a wealthy owner is willing, or able, to do for a struggling newspaper in the digital era,” writes William D. Cohan. Owner Alice Rogoff, wife of Carlyle Group co-founder David Rubenstein, bought the newspaper in 2014, but filed for bankruptcy earlier this year after being unable to keep up with the paper’s mounting debts. “Creating indispensable journalism—whether at the local or national level—is not without cost,” Cohan concludes. “If people aren’t willing to pay for it, like they

Madonna’s book “Sex” PW recently asked women who work in book publishing if they’ve experienced sexual harassment, assault, or predatory behavior in the workplace. “We found that in spite of publishing’s high percentage of female workers (it’s estimated at roughly 80%), the industry still has a sexual harassment problem.” Simon and Schuster has announced that it will publish John McCain’s new memoir, The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations, in April. BuzzFeed looks back at Madonna’s book Sex, the bestselling, fifty-dollar coffee-table book was published twenty-five years ago. On the occasion of the publication of

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Vogue magazine and Vice are joining up to create Project Vs, a website and branding exchange that will launch early next year. A Vice spokesman explained the project this way: “What started as a slow dance collaboration has quickly become a high speed collision between Vice and Vogue, juxtaposing the many social, political and cultural tensions of our times to create a capsule commentary on the world we live in.” On Literary Hub’s fiction/non/fiction podcast, Whitney Terrell, V.V. Ganeshananthan, Jia Tolentino, and Claire Vaye Watkins discuss the Harvey Weinstein scandal. As part of the T: The