Lillian Ross Lillian Ross, who wrote for the New Yorker for sixty years, died yesterday at 99. The New York Times writes that Ross “preached unobtrusive reporting and practiced what she preached.” At the New Yorker, Rebecca Mead reflects on working with Ross, who was still writing for the magazine when Mead joined the staff in 1997. “Lillian was a generous champion of younger writers at the magazine, especially younger writers who sought, like her, to chronicle New York’s human comedy,” she writes. “In them—in us—she surely recognized her mischievous, enduring, shit-kicking self.” The magazine also offers a selection

Zadie Smith Zadie Smith says that staying off of social media allows her to reserve the right to be wrong. “I have seen on Twitter, I’ve seen it at a distance, people have a feeling at 9 a.m. quite strongly, and then by 11 have been shouted out of it and can have a completely opposite feeling four hours later,” Smith told the New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino at an event earlier this week. “I want to have my feeling, even if it’s wrong, even if it’s inappropriate, express it to myself in the privacy of my heart and my

Michelle McNamara. Photo: Robyn Von Swank Paul Farhi reflects on why crime journalist Kevin Deutsch’s numerous instances of unidentifiable sources and possible fabrications were overlooked until the recent publication of his second book, Pill City. “One possibility is that Deutsch’s questionable sources were merely peripheral to his stories, providing ‘color’ about widely reported events,” Farhi writes. “But it’s also possible that a journalist dealing with people on the fringes of society faces less accountability than one reporting in the center of the public square.” Harper Collins will publish Michelle McNamara’s final book, which she was working on when she

David Carr NBC plans to create a new hub dedicated to the coverage of the media industry, and has hired Claire Atkinson, the former media reporter for the New York Post, to head the project. Other new hires include former Buzzfeed news editor Ben Smith and Recode editor Kara Swisher. David Carr, who died in 2015, was known as many things—recovering addict, media columnist for the Times, author of the bestselling memoir The Night of the Gun. He was also a tough and generous mentor to many younger writers. Now, at The Atlantic, more than a dozen authors remember the

Junot Diaz The nominees for the 2017 National Book Award in nonfiction have been announced, and include Kevin Young’s Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News, David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the F.B.I., Masha Gessen’s The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, and James Forman Jr.’s Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America. The longlist for fiction will be announced later today. New York Times reporter Mike Isaac is writing a book about Uber, which will be published in 2019 by

Curtis Sittenfeld The shortlist for the 2017 Man Booker Prize has been announced. Not everyone is happy with it. At the Washington Post, Ron Charles thinks the list is “too American.” And at The Guardian, Claire Hynes wonders: “How many Man Bookers must writers of colour win before they’re accepted?” Are Democrats nervous about Hillary Clinton’s widely publicized book tour? As some have suggested, What Happened doesn’t skimp on critiques of the party: “In the book, Clinton is less than flattering in her assessment of her primary election opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders. She even complains about decisions her old

Maggie Haberman Thomas Beller, author of J. D. Salinger: The Escape Artist, writes about his experiences working for the Cambodia Daily, and reports on that paper’s abrupt closing following threats from the government last week. “There were many news items about the threat to the Daily and the authoritarian turn away from democracy. On Sunday, September 3rd, the leader of the opposition party was arrested in the middle of the night, charged with treason, and taken to a remote prison. The following edition of the paper carried the headline ‘Descent into outright dictatorship,’ above the fold. At the bottom was

Ira Lightman Lani Sarem’s YA novel Handbook for Mortals debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list when it was released in August. Quickly, however, questions were raised about the book’s legitimacy on the list: Did the author, who most people in the YA community had never heard of, somehow game the system? The Times quickly pulled the book from the list. Now, the author is trying to make her side of the story known. “While I am not selling the books through traditional channels established by the book industry,” she writes, “the sales of my

Ian Buruma Emily Temple explains why Rebel in the Rye, Danny Strong’s new feature film about J. D. Salinger, is “bad for writers.” “A while ago, I wrote a piece about why every aspiring writer should see Paterson, Jim Jarmusch’s excellent film about a young poet living in Paterson, New Jersey. This movie is the other side of the coin. Writers should not see Rebel in the Rye. I mean, do what you want, but if Paterson was a realistic evocation of the life of a creative person, Rebel in the Rye is the utter opposite. Not only is

Roxane Gay. Photo: Jay Grabiec. Yesterday on Facebook, Roxane Gay announced that she has been hired to write an advice column for the New York Times. Bestselling author James Patterson donated $1.75 million to public-school teachers to help improve their classroom libraries. The Portland, Oregon, book festival Wordstock has released the lineup of this year’s event, which will take place on November 11. Author who will participate in the festival include Mac Barnett, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Carson Ellis, Jeffrey Eugenides, Adam Gopnik, David Grann, Jenny Han, Daniel Handler, Claire Messud, Tom Perrotta, Danez Smith, Lidia Yuknavitch, and many more. In

Kate Millett Graydon Carter has announced that he will end his twenty-five-year run as the editor of Vanity Fair in December. The New York Times notes the significance of the news: “Mr. Carter’s influence and stature in the magazine and entertainment world is so great that to call his exit a changing of the guard seems insufficient: This is more of a regal passage.” Kate Millet, the feminist author best known for her 1970 book Sexual Politics, has died. The New York Times has hired progressive writer Michelle Goldberg to be a full-time columnist. She is one of three

Vanessa Grigoriadis In the wake of the president’s order to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), it’s worth revisiting Valeria Luiselli’s November 2016 Lit Hub essay about the consequences of ending the program and the options for resistance. Luiselli writes that sustained daily action is the most effective form of protest and underscores the necessity of active resistance: “I don’t think I can bear hearing one more person declaring any variation of ‘Even though I am not a Trump-target, I am still hurt/worried/ashamed/full-of-guilt.’ When anyone in a society is the target of institutionalized violence, everyone in that society

John Ashbery Chelsea Manning will headline this year’s New Yorker Festival. Other events at the festival include a discussion between Preet Bharara, the New York federal attorney who was appointed by President Obama and later fired by Trump, and legal writer Jeffrey Toobin. Following John Ashbery’s death this weekend, there have been a number of tributes: Paul Muldoon writes about how Ashbery “changed the rules of American poetry”; the New York Times has published an obituary (coauthored by author Dinitia Smith and poetry critic David Orr) and a selection of Ashbery’s poems; and at Rolling Stone, Rob Sheffield took

The American poet John Ashbery has died at age ninety. “What more is there to do, except stay? And that we cannot do.”

Jhumpa Lahiri Francesca Pellas talks to Jhumpa Lahiri about language learning, translation, and why it’s never a good idea to write with readers in mind. When Lahiri first started writing in Italian, she says other writers discouraged her from the project, saying that there would be no readers. But Lahiri said she was never worried about whether people needed her book or not. “I think that writing must also be a selfish act,” she said. “A book might reach out to someone else at some point, after years, or maybe never at all, but it is not up to

Danzy Senna The Rumpus talks to Danzy Senna about 1990s Brooklyn, Jonestown, and why she gave up on another novel in favor of writing her latest book, New People. “There was something in it that wasn’t moving forward. I think I couldn’t quite find the story. Sometimes a character’s problem starts to bleed into the novel itself, the writing, and my character in the other novel didn’t want anything,” she said. “I also, on a practical level, had two children and they were young, demanding, and more interesting to me than my novel at the time.” At Mother Jones,

KHOU reporter Brandi Smith Sarah Palin’s lawsuit against the New York Times has been dismissed. Palin had sued the paper over an editorial that linked the 2011 shooting at a Tucson rally for Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords to an image from Palin’s PAC that showed crosshairs over certain congressional districts. No link between the shooter and the map had been proven, and the Times corrected the article. “Nowhere is political journalism so free, so robust, or perhaps so rowdy as in the United States,” Judge Jed Rakoff wrote in his dismissal. “In the exercise of that freedom, mistakes will be

Miranda July. Photo: Todd Cole Paul Farhi explores press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s tendency to deflect questions with a promise to “get back to” reporters with an answer later—and her habit of breaking that promise. In one briefing last week, Sanders’s used the deflection ten times, on issues ranging from the ban on transgender soldiers to “the White House’s reaction to federal approval of Amazon.com’s acquisition of Whole Foods Market.” Farhi asked Sanders directly about her rate of reply, to which she responded that she gets back to reporters whenever possible. “Asked in a subsequent email if she avoids

Rebecca Solnit. Photo: Jim Herrington Hilary Mantel explains why, two decades after her death, people are still talking about Princess Diana “as if she had just left the room.” “Royal people exist in a place beyond fact-correction, in a mystical realm with rules that, as individuals, they may not see,” she writes. “They exist apart from utility, and by virtue of our unexamined and irrational needs. You can’t write or speak about the princess without explicating and embellishing her myth. She no longer exists as herself, only as what we made of her.” Rebecca Solnit talks to The Guardian about

Jesmyn Ward Claire Messud remembers the fiction of her mother’s library, and how it formed her literary life. “For a long time I believed that the books I read were more or less universally known,” she writes. “It didn’t occur to me that by borrowing and devouring books selected by my mother, I was being shaped by her predilections, thoughts and desires.” The Stranger’s Rich Smith looks into the controversy behind PEN Literary Award nominee John Smelcer, who Marlon James recently referred to as a “living con job” due to his falsified credentials and questionable claims of Native American