The Swedish ambassador to China is under investigation after “she was accused of arranging unauthorized, secret talks” between imprisoned publisher Gui Minhai’s daughter and “two Chinese men who had offered to help free him, but instead pressured her to keep silent,” the New York Times reports.

“At the very least, town halls could be saved for candidates who are actually running,” writes Columbia Journalism Review’s Jon Allsop on CNN’s recent town-hall interview with Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz. “Whenever he was asked a tough, personal question last night, Schultz looked at Harlow with a

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, the New York Times offers a list of “books for broken hearts,” including Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, and Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation.

Verso is launching a fiction imprint. Verso Fiction will publish two to four works a year, with a focus on translated fiction, starting later this year.

Amazon is adapting Naomi Alderman’s The Power into a streaming series.

Columbine author Dave Cullen talks to Columbia Journalism Review about reporting on school shootings, gun control, and his new book, Parkland.

Katie Couric is working on a memoir. In Unexpected, USA Today reports that “Couric plans to share details both ‘hilarious’ and ‘humiliating’ as she looks back on her prize-winning, 40-year career.” The book will be published by Little, Brown in 2021.

At Longreads, Lily Meyer talks to Valeria Luiselli about observation, how being bilingual affects her writing, and her new book, Lost Children Archive. “One language always has a word that’s more accurate. There are words that are exactly right, but the exact word doesn’t exist in the other language,” she said. “It forces you to sit and think

Haruki Murakami talks to the New Yorker’s Deborah Treisman about cats, alternate worlds, and how he became a writer. Murakami says that inspiration struck at a Yakult Swallows baseball game in Tokyo. “The first batter hit a double, and at that moment I got a feeling I could write. Maybe I’d drunk too much beer,” he explained. “Before that I hadn’t written anything at all. I was the owner of a jazz club, and I was so busy making cocktails and sandwiches. I make very good sandwiches! But after that game I went to the stationery store and bought some supplies, and then I started writing and I

Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of the New York Times, is continuing to do damage control following allegations that parts of her new book, Merchants of Truth, are plagiarized. “All of the allegations that I lifted material or plagiarized—that’s not true, but I did make mistakes in the footnotes, and there are some uncited passages,” Abramson told Vox’s Sean Illing. “Those sources are credited in other footnotes; it’s just those specific quotes are not, and that’s an error and it will be fixed pronto.” When Illing pointed out that at least one article—a Jake Malooley piece about

Dan Mallory, the pseudonymous author of The Woman in the Window who was recently exposed by the New Yorker for lying about his health and past, will publish a second novel with HarperCollins UK, The Guardian reports. “Professionally, Dan was a highly valued editor and the publication of The Woman in the Window – a Sunday Times bestseller – speaks for itself,” the publisher said in a statement.

Reporter Jim DeRogatis, who has spent decades investigating the accusations against R. Kelly, is working on a book about the allegations against singer. Soulless: The Case Against R. Kelly will be

Craigslist founder Craig Newmark is donating $10 million to the Columbia Journalism School to endow the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security.

Alice Marie Johnson, who was serving a life sentence for drug trafficking until Kim Kardashian convinced Donald Trump to commute her sentence, is writing a memoir. After Life: My Journey From Incarceration to Freedom, which includes a foreword by Kardashian, will be published by HarperCollins in May.

R.O. Kwon and Esmé Weijun Wang discuss ambition, writer’s block, and karaoke.

At Longreads, Danielle Jackson talks to Reniqua Allen

The 2019 Wellcome Prize longlist has been announced. Nominees include Thomas Page McBee’s Amateur, Tara Westover’s Educated, and Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation. The winner announced in May.

PEN America has announced the winners of this year’s nomination-based literary awards. Honorees, including Sandra Cisneros and Larissa Fasthorse among others, will receive their prizes at a ceremony later this month.

Netflix has ordered a series based on Karin Slaughter’s 2018 crime novel, Pieces of Her.

At LitHub, Bowlaway author Elizabeth McCracken considers the doughnut. “Like most

In an essay at LitHub, Marlon James explores why he has written extensively about his father, but never about his mother. “She was the one always there, and yet the one harder to write about. It’s easy to spin a clever fiction about my father. Not so easy to string words about my mom, the person who applied bandages and bought schoolbooks, but also the adult often around during long stretches of holiday boredom. Even on a purely linguistic level, ‘the man who wasn’t there’ sounds sexier than ‘the woman who was always present,’” he explains. “But there goes my daddy again, hijacking a story

Bestselling author Marianne Williamson, who ran for congress in California in 2014, has announced that she is running for president as a Democrat in the 2020 elections. Williamson is the author of A Return to Love, in which she reflects on the spiritual guidebook A Course in Miracles, and many other books, and has also become well known as a public speaker. Williamson is calling for a “moral and spiritual awakening in the US,” and has vowed to fight the “amoral economic system” and the “layers of systemic racism” in the US. She also believes in universal health care, free higher education, and

At the Paris Review, Peyton Burgess talks to Maurice Carlos Ruffin about survivalists, white supremacy, and his new book, We Cast a Shadow. “The thing is, I believe that America is the greatest country on earth, yet we always have multiple layers of injustice that are operating at any given time,” Ruffin said. “When I was writing this book in 2012, President Obama was constantly shipping immigrants out of the country. Now it’s to the point of taking kids from their parents—and for half of America that’s still no big deal.”

LitHub’s Gabrielle Bellot reflects on Edwidge Danticat, Albert Camus,