Sam Shepard The non-profit feminist organization Vida: Women in Literary Arts has released the results of their 2016 Count, a survey that tallies the gender of contributors to literary magazines. In the aftermath of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, The Cut is publishing stories by women about the sexual harassment and assault they’ve experienced. The latest comes from Emma Cline, author of the novel The Girls, who details the gendered violence she’s faced. Cline writes about the ways in which women’s stories of abuse are minimized or explained away, noting that women often have little choice but to stay silent

George Saunders George Saunders has won the Man Booker prize for his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. The Guardian’s Justine Jordan writes that while the decision to give the award to two Americans in a row might bother some, Saunders’s book was the right choice for this year. “At a time when America is notably divided, the book drills down to its early rupture,” she writes. “In this book there is warmth mixed into the weirdness, moral force behind the grotesquerie, and wild humour amid the tragedy.” Natalie Hopkinson examines the Man Booker’s dark history. The prize was

Dave Bry The Man Booker Prize winner will be announced this afternoon at 4:40 pm (EDT). According to the Daily News, George Saunders is the bookies’ favorite to win for his novel Lincoln in the Bardo. The other nominees are 4321 by Paul Auster, History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund, Exit West by Mohsin Hamid, Elmet by Fiona Mozley, and Autumn by Ali Smith. (For some reason, the judges skipped Zadie Smith’s big novel, Swing Time, among other high-profile snubs.) With three Americans (Fridlund, Auster, and Saunders) on the list this year, The Guardian asks: “British writers can’t win the

Hilton Als Richard Wilbur—who won two Pulitzer Prizes and a National Book Award and served as the second US Poet Laureate—has died at age ninety-six. In 1957, the poet and critic Randall Jarrell wrote that Wilbur’s poem “A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra” was “one of the most marvelously beautiful, one of the most nearly perfect poems any American has written.” The National Book Foundation has announced that Bill Clinton will be one of the presenters at the National Book Awards ceremony on November 15. The October 1 vote on Catalonian independence has reportedly led to a dip

Jennifer Egan. Photo: Pieter M. van Hattem Slate’s Isaac Chotiner talks to New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor about her work on last week’s article exposing Harvey Weinstein’s history of sexual harassment and abuse. Though Kantor was happy to discuss the reporting process and why her sources chose to come forward, she was less willing to speculate on how the women felt about having their stories ignored for so long. “You’d have to ask them that,” she said, “but honestly I think a lot of them were more consumed with their own feelings.” In regards to Sharon Waxman’s assertion

Jesmyn Ward The MacArthur Foundation has announced the recipients of their 2017 “Genius” grants. Winners include novelists Viet Thanh Nguyen and Jesmyn Ward, as well as New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones. Axios rounds up the “dirty old men exposed in sex scandals” over the past year. At The Awl, Silvia Killingsworth sends a message to the Harvey Weinsteins and Bill O’Reilly’s of the world. “Every industry, from food service to the art world to the field of Antarctic geology has its own Harvey Weinstein, and we’re not keeping quiet about it anymore,” she writes. “So let this serve not

Attica Locke. Photo: Jenny Walters The New Yorker has published their own expose of Harvey Weinstein’s history of sexual harassment and assault. Writer Ronan Farrow had originally pitched it to NBC, where he is a contributor, but the network turned it down due to “concerns related to the story’s sourcing.” After Mika Brzezinski threatened to cancel a three-book deal with Harvey Weinstein’s publishing imprint, parent company Hachette Book Group reiterated that they will be honoring all contracts from Weinstein Books. “We will consider all our options going forward,” a company spokesperson said, “keeping support for our authors foremost.” Attica

Chuck Palahniuk Rafia Zakaria looks at ways in which the 2016 presidential election is “being replayed in Amazon reviews.” Zakaria notes that it isn’t just high profile books like Hillary Clinton’s What Happened that receive politically-motivated one-star reviews. Mark Bray’s Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook received numerous poor reviews after an alt-right Reddit group encouraged its members to lower the book’s rating. Other authors have used these incidents to equate their own detractors with far-right trolls, like Democracy in Chains author Nancy MacLean, who accused academics who questioned her research of being “funded by the tycoons in her book.” “With

Sloane Crosley Michael Sunderland, a senior writer for Vice’s feminist website Broadly, was fired on Friday after Buzzfeed reported, in an in-depth article that revealed journalists who have provided material to Breitbart writers, that Sunderland urged former Breitbart tech editor and alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos in a letter: “Please mock this fat feminist.” (The letter included a link to an article by New York Times columnist Lindy West.) According to its press materials, Broadly “is devoted to representing the multiplicity of women’s experiences. … we provide a sustained focus on the issues that matter most to women.” Entertainment Weekly

Kazuo Ishiguro. Photo: Jeff Cottenden Critics reflect on novelist Kazuo Ishiguro winning the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature. At The Guardian, John Mullan writes that “the Swedish Academy has made some dubious – and last year attention-seeking – decisions in recent years, but this year its 18 voters have got it right.” The New York Times’s Dwight Garner praised Ishiguro for creating “worlds that are clear in a sentence-by-sentence way, but in which the big picture recedes against the horizon.” The Washington Post’s Ron Charles observes that the award “looks like a course correction” after last year’s prize went

Anuk Arudpragasam This morning, the Nobel Prize committee announced that Kazuo Ishiguro has won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature. Ishiguro is best known for his 1989 novel, The Remains of the Day, a book that exemplifies one of his maxims: “As a writer, I’m more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.” His latest novel is The Buried Giant, published in 2015. The National Book Foundation has released its list of finalists for the 2017 National Book Award. Honorees include Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing; Masha Gessen’s The Future is History; David Grann’s Killers of the

John Cook Special projects editor John Cook is leaving Gizmodo Media. According to a memo obtained by Business Insider, Cook decided to take a cue from other Gawker staff who took a break after the company’s court battle with Hulk Hogan. “I’ve watched with envy in recent months as various friends — including the occasional former colleague — have taken some time away from the news grind to clear their heads and get their bearings,” he wrote. “After the last year and a half — even with the distance we’ve been able to put between ourselves the the Troubles

Ismail Muhammad CNN was impressed by Trump’s remarks in the wake of the Las Vegas mass shooting, with no fewer than three pundits calling the president’s words “pitch perfect.” At the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik was disturbed by a telling discordant note: Trump offering “warmest” condolences to the victims’ families. As Gopnik writes, “President Trump, deprived from birth by some genetic accident of all natural human empathy . . . speaks empathy as a foreign language and makes the kinds of mistakes we all make in a second language. . . . Who sends warmest anything to the families

Lou Reed S. I. Newhouse Jr.—who once owned the Random House publishing company and later went on to buy the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and a number of other magazines—has died at age eighty-nine. The Hollywood Reporter is already asking Lena Dunham if she plans to adapt Hillary Clinton’s new memoir, What Happened, for TV. An excerpt from Anthony DeCurtis’s new biography of Lou Reed recalls how the legendary musician came to interview playwright, dissident, and later president of the Czech Republic Vaclav Havel. Rolling Stone, which originally commissioned the interview, killed the piece. “It was definitely terrible,” said one

Edward St. Aubyn Jennifer Egan tells the Times about what she read while working on her latest novel, Manhattan Beach. Besides true stories of survival at sea and fiction like Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, there was also a 1942 edition of the Merchant Marine Officers’ Handbook, which earned her “some quizzical looks on the elliptical machine.” The Columbia Journalism Review collects the best articles from Playboy, whose founder Hugh Hefner died Wednesday at the age of 91. The Times rounds up Hefner’s most memorable interviews. Carly Lewis talks to Lauren McKeon about her new book, F-Bomb, a study

Jenny Zhang Marlon James is writing a television adaptation of his novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, for Amazon. The show will be directed by Insecure director Melina Matsoukas. “It’s been my dream to bring this story to life onscreen since reading the first line of Marlon’s book,” Matsoukas said in a statement. “I am deeply honored to be entrusted with this tapestry of stories so entrenched in roots, reggae, race, mysticism and politics, while working alongside Marlon to ensure an authentic portrayal of his words.” Jennifer Palmieri, a former aide to Hillary Clinton, is writing a “book

James McBride. Photo: Chia Messina James McBride talks to the Washington Post about humanity, how music affects his writing, and his new book, Five-Carat Soul. “Music . . . gives you the capacity to hear different voices in different keys in different settings,” he said. “Any good writer can do it, but maybe music allows you to hear it and instill it with a little more zing and punch and humor.” Lauren Williams has been named editor in chief of Vox, replacing Ezra Klein, who will serve as editor at large. The company is also launching a new podcast,

Zinzi Clemmons. Photo: Nina Subin The National Book Foundation has announced its 5 Under 35 honorees, all of whom are women. Lesley Nneka Arimah, Halle Butler, Zinzi Clemmons, Leopoldine Core, and Weike Wang will each receive $1,000. “At a moment in which we are having the necessary conversations surrounding the underrepresentation of female voices, it’s a thrill to see this list of tremendous women chosen organically by our selectors,” National Book Foundation executive director Lisa Lucas said. “These writers and their work represent an incredibly bright future for the world of literary fiction.” The New York Times’s Jim Windolf

Joe Hagan Showtime has announced that it will run a TV series based on The President Is Missing, the forthcoming thriller co-authored by Bill Clinton and James Patterson. maybe half-heard from outside through the curtains. That voice could occasionally sound explicitly poetic or expressionistically fractured, but more often—and more consistently as time went by—it sounded conversational, demotic, mild, even-toned, deep-dish American.” “I’m so bored with arguments against memoir,” says Wild author Cheryl Strayed. “They’re almost always simple-minded and ignorant. . . . Yes, there are memoirs that are narcissistic and awful! Just like there are novels that are narcissistic

Carmen Maria Machado. Photo: Tom Storm Orion is publishing an anthology about Brexit this November. Goodbye, Europe, will include works from forty-six contributors, including a short story by Lionel Shriver “about a relationship ending in the wake of the referendum,” a reflection by Jessie Burton “about her first visit to the continent,” and an essay by Robert MacFarlane “about the flight paths of the migrant bird species that the UK shares with Europe.” Shaun King has been hired by The Intercept as a columnist. Most recently, King was a columnist at the New York Daily News. The website has