Ragnar Jónasson The Guardian and 4th Estate are looking for submissions for the BAME short story prize. The competition aims to highlight the work of black, Asian, and minority ethnic writers in the UK and Ireland. “It is not a shortage of talent and confidence among the UK’s BAME writers that is preventing their work from making it to our bookshelves,” Sian Cain writes. Crime novelist Ragnar Jónasson has signed a deal with Minotaur, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press. His first book in his new series will be published in June 2018. Michael Luo is taking over as

Bharati Mukherjee The New Yorker and Vanity Fair have both decided to cancel their White House Correspondents’ Dinner events. In an email, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter reminded staff that the magazine has not attended the dinner in the past, and that “he planned to spend the weekend fishing in Connecticut instead.” A tech firm with ties to Russia has filed a defamation lawsuit against BuzzFeed for publishing a dossier of unconfirmed intelligence findings related to Donald Trump and his connections to Putin. The document alleged that XBT Holdings, a company owned by Aleksej Gubarev, had assisted the Kremlin

Colm Tóibín The Weekly Standard reports that the conservative, pseudonymous writer Publius Decius Mus, who advanced one of the few intellectual arguments in support of Trump during the 2016 election, is now a senior national-security official in the Trump administration. As Decius, Michael Anton wrote numerous articles for the Claremont Review of Books website insisting “that electing Trump and implementing Trumpism was the best and only way to stave off American decline—making a cerebral case to make America great again.” Anton had previously worked for the Bush administration in a similar security role and “unlike most of his colleagues,

Mohammed Tawfeeq Hillary Clinton will write a book of personal essays, to be published by Simon Schuster next fall. The currently-untitled book will include her thoughts on the 2016 election. In a statement, publisher Jonathan Karp said, “For the past 21 years, the Gallup survey has ranked Hillary Rodham Clinton as the most admired woman in the world, and there are at least 65 million people in the United States who agree. We think a lot of them are going to want to hear her stories.” CNN Money talks to Jeff Jobe, one of the first journalists to attend

Arundhati Roy Political reporter Olivia Nuzzi will become New York magazine’s first Washington correspondent. Nuzzi, who most recently covered Trump’s presidential campaign for the Daily Beast, talked to the Columbia Journalism Review about her new job covering “the psychodrama of the Beltway,” which she says makes her “equal parts excited and terrified.” Arundhati Roy talks about her upcoming book, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, her first novel in twenty years. Roy says that she has spent the last ten years working on the book, and that the characters she has spent a decade with “have conspired to confound accepted categories

Porochista Khakpour In response to the Trump administration’s hostility towards the press, Samantha Bee will be hosting an event on the same night as the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Proceeds from Not the White House Correspondents’ Dinner will benefit the Committee to Protect Journalists. Although White House Correspondents’ Association president Jeff Mason told the Hollywood Reporter that the event will happen as planned, Bee told the publication that she suspects “it will either get called off or it will be the most sinister awkward thing you’ve ever seen.” Caitlyn Jenner will be co-writing her memoir with Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist

Julia Ioffe The felony rioting case brought against Vocativ’s Evan Engel has been dropped. Engel was arrested while covering anti-Trump protests in Washington, DC, on Inauguration Day. In a statement, Engel said his “thoughts are with any other journalists who are facing charges for doing their jobs, as well as with journalists imprisoned around the world.” At The Atlantic, journalist Julia Ioffe writes about her family’s experience as Soviet refugees, describing what it is like to be the subject of debates and policy decisions made by strangers many miles away: “They don’t know you. They don’t know the days

John Edgar Wideman Despite statements made earlier this week by Alex Jones, the Infowars’s site-runner has not been offered White House press credentials. BuzzFeed reports that in a YouTube video, Jones claimed that the Trump administration would be offering press credentials to him and his news site: “We’re going to get them, but I’ve just got to spend the money to send somebody there. I want to make sure it’s even worth it.” Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said that Jones “is not credentialed for the White House,” and that they had not offered any credentials. BuzzFeed has hired Steven

Roxanne Gay. Photo: Kevin Nance Author Harry Mathews died yesterday in Key West, Florida, at the age of 86. A long-time contributor to the Paris Review, Mathews was also the only American member of Oulipo, the French literary society “whose stated purpose is to devise mathematical structures that can be used to create literature.” During his nearly sixty-year career, Mathews published numerous works of fiction, poetry, and essays. With James Schuyler and John Ashbery, he started the journal Locus Solus. Of his novel Cigarettes (1987), Edmund White wrote: “This book is remarkable, as involving as a 19th-century saga and

Howard Jacobson Six journalists are now facing felony charges after being arrested while covering protests at the inauguration. Vocativ’s Evan Engel, RT America’s Alex Rubinstein, Story of America producer Jack Keller, and freelancers Matt Hopard, Shay Horse, and Aaron Cantú have all denied the charges. According to The Guardian, “none of the arrest reports for the six journalists makes any specific allegations about what any of them are supposed to have done wrong,” and five of the six arrest reports contain identical language. Carlos Lauria, the senior Americas coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists, called for the charges

Philip Roth At the New Yorker, Judith Thurman emails with Philip Roth about the similarities between the Trump presidency and the presidency of Charles Lindbergh, which Roth invented for his novel The Plot Against America. Roth writes that a Lindbergh presidency makes more sense than a Trump presidency: “Lindbergh, despite his Nazi sympathies and racist proclivities, was a great aviation hero who had displayed tremendous physical courage and aeronautical genius in crossing the Atlantic in 1927. He had character and he had substance. . . . Trump is just a con artist.” According to Roth, the book that is

Women’s March on Washington. Photo: Mobilus In Mobili In September, New York Times executiveeditor Dean Baquet spoke on an “Inside the Times” podcast about the publication’s duty to call out candidate Trump’s untrue statements. This was certainly the case with the Times’s coverage of his first full day in office, when the paper published at least three articles about the president’s false claims regarding the size of the crowd at his inauguration and the origin of his feud with the CIA: “White House Pushes ‘Alternative Facts.’ Here are the Real Ones;” “With False Claims, Trump Attacks Media on Turnout and

Patrick Kingsley The intrepid investigative reporter Wayne Barrett, who enjoyed a long tenure at the Village Voice in the newsweekly’s heyday, died yesterday. Barrett’s books included Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11 and Trump: The Deals and the Downfalls. The latter book, which was originally published in 1992, had a resurgence this year, selling for hundreds of dollars on Amazon until it was rereleased as an e-book with a new introduction by the author. Barrett remained an expert critic of Trump, who once had the reporter physically removed from a party, until the end. Barrett criticized many politicians, but in

Helen Oyeyemi. Photo: Tom Pilston The finalists for the PEN America Literary Awards were announced yesterday. Nominees include Helen Oyeyemi’s What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, Solmaz Sharif’s Look, Arthur Lubow’s Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer, and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing. Textbook publisher Pearson announced plans yesterday to sell its 47 percent stake in Penguin Random House, which it owns in partnership with Bertelsmann. The move has staff and authors concerned about consolidation. One anonymous author told The Guardian that although the company seems to be doing fine financially, “you always worry that any added pressure to streamline

Jon Meacham The New York Times released their “2020 Report” yesterday, which outlines the publication’s strategies and goals. The authors of the report focused on increasing subscribers and embracing digital journalism. “Too often, digital progress has been accomplished through workarounds; now we must tear apart the barriers,” the introduction states. “We must differentiate between mission and tradition: what we do because it’s essential to our values and what we do because we’ve always done it.” In a memo to staff, executive editor Dean Baquet and managing editor Joseph Kahn clarified which of the report’s directives would be implemented in

Yaa Gyasi. Photo: Michael Lionstar At Politico, Jack Shafer writes that Trump’s presidency could unintentionally Make Journalism Great Again. Shafer takes examples from Trump’s press conferences, Reince Priebus’s plan to evict journalists from the White House, and Sean Spicer’s control over news briefings to suggest that journalists will have plenty of chances to hone their skills over the next four years. “Instead of relying exclusively on the traditional skills of political reporting,” Shafer writes, “the carriers of press cards ought to start thinking of covering Trump’s Washington like a war zone, where conflict follows conflict, where the fog prevents

Svetlana Alexievich Nobel Prize-winning author Svetlana Alexievich has left Russian PEN. She is joining thirty other writers in protesting PEN’s decision to expel journalist Sergey Parkhomenko after he criticized the group for not supporting a jailed Ukranian filmmaker. In her letter, Alexievich writes that the group’s decision to disavow Parkhomenko is an echo of the Stalinist era. “Putin will go, whereas this shameful page from the history of PEN will stay,” Alexievich writes. “We now live through times when we cannot win over evil, we are powerless before the ‘red man’. But he cannot stop time. I believe in

Ani DiFranco Ani DiFranco has announced plans for her first book, to be published by Viking. The singer will write a memoir about her early years in New York and her political activism. A release date and title have yet to be set. BuzzFeed sold more than $25,000 worth of t-shirts, garbage cans, and bumper stickers on Wednesday after Donald Trump called the website as a “failing pile of garbage.” All proceeds from the sale are being donated to the Committee to Protect Journalists. The BBC is creating its own fact-checking team to fight the spread of fake news.

Zadie Smith After publishing a dossier of unverified intelligence findings on president-elect Donald Trump, BuzzFeed editor in chief Ben Smith defended the decision in a memo to staff. “Our presumption is to be transparent in our journalism and to share what we have with our readers,” Smith wrote. “In this case, the document was in wide circulation at the highest levels of American government and media.” Other news outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post, among others, have stated that they did have the report, but chose not to publish it after they were unable to

Marlon James. Photo: Jeffrey Skemp Marlon James has announced plans for a series of fantasy books. James told Entertainment Weekly that the idea for the book came from an argument about the film version of The Hobbit. “I remember saying, ‘You know, if an Asian or a black hobbit came out of the Shire, nobody would have cared. We would have just moved on,’” James said. “And my friend said, ‘Well, Lord of the Rings is all this British and Celtic mythology.’ And I said, ‘Well, you know… Lord of the Rings isn’t real.’ . . . I think