Meera Subramanian Glancing back: In 2015, Amazon’s stock prices went up 117 percent and the Educational Development Corp’s stock prices went up 128 percent, creating a jump in publishing-industry share prices. Meanwhile, Barnes and Noble’s stocks fell 26 percent. Looking ahead: the News Observer offers predictions for 2016—“Paper is popular, science fiction rises, long-form nonfiction dips.” The New York Times does not call Sean Penn’s meeting with Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the Mexican drug lord known as El Chapo, unethical, but it does raise the question. Penn’s article about the drug lord was published this weekend in Rolling Stone (just

Chris Kraus The Fales Library Special Collections at NYU, known for its unique materials on Riot Grrrl and the Downtown New York scene, has acquired Chris Kraus’s papers, including her personal diaries—the source material for novels that ingeniously combined theory, fiction, and autobiography—and her correspondence as founding editor of Semiotext(e)’s Native Agents imprint, as well as film and video footage from her time as a filmmaker in New York in the 1980s and ‘90s. “Dear Dick,” Kraus wrote, in her groundbreaking 1997 epistolary novel I Love Dick, “I guess in a sense I’ve killed you. You’ve become Dear Diary.”

Anne Carson The celebrated poet Anne Carson is branching out into short stories—there’s one in the New Yorker this week, and another in Harper’s Magazine. As writers struggle to make anything you might call a living, Philip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials trilogy and current president of the UK’s Society of Authors, has asked British publishers to offer fairer contractual terms: “We authors see a landscape occupied by several large interests, some of them gathering profits in the billions, some of them displaying a questionable attitude to paying tax, some of them colonising the internet with projects

Eileen Myles It seems that Lee Bo, the latest of five Hong Kong booksellers to have gone missing recently, may be being held by authorities in mainland China. CNN cites one source as suggesting that a publisher Lee and the others are connected to “had been planning on publishing a book about the ‘love affairs’ of China’s President Xi Jinping during his time working ‘in the provinces.’” To make amends for its infamous “80 Books Every Man Should Read” list—”What can we say? We messed up”—Esquire greets the new year with a new list, selected by women including Roxane

Karl Ove Knausgaard Only a couple of years after winning the Costa novel award for Life After Life, Kate Atkinson has received it again for the sequel, A God in Ruins, making her the first writer ever to win three Costa prizes. Bookslut founder Jessa Crispin adds her voice to the conversation about Claire Vaye Watkins’s “On Pandering” and Marlon James’s assertion that white women’s tastes shape the publishing industry: “It is easier to complain about the power you don’t have than to think about how you are exerting the power you do have. And fighting for your own rights

Tom Clancy A British intelligence file kept secret until last week reveals that President Reagan boned up for his meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev at the 1986 nuclear-disarmament talks in Iceland by reading Tom Clancy’s novel Red Storm Rising. The president thought Clancy’s Cold War thriller, which imagines events leading up to World War III, explained the Soviet Union so well that he strongly urged Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to read it too.  Tired of home-delivery problems, editors and reporters at the Boston Globe decided to deliver thousands of copies of the paper themselves on Sunday. The paper says that

Joanna Walsh Reporters without Borders has published one of the bleaker year-end reports, pointing out that 110 journalists were killed in 2015. The reasons for some of the deaths remain unknown, but it has been confirmed that at least sixty-seven of the journalists “were targeted because of their work or were killed while reporting.” At Variety, Thelma Adams looks at the problem of gender disparity in film criticism. The Barnes and Noble Review hasn’t been sending its regular newsletters this month, which has apparently caused some to wonder if the online publication is on the rocks. But Mary Ellen

Amitav Ghosh 2015 was an eventful year in media that saw the death of David Carr, the introduction of the New York Times’s virtual-reality app, the groundbreaking Caitlyn Jenner Vanity Fair cover, and Jon Stewart’s departure from TheDaily Show. The Observer rounds up the year’s biggest media stories, and looks ahead to the stories we’ll be hearing about in the new year. A Barnes and Noble in New York is applying for a liquor license. Perhaps they are celebrating the news that print is not dead? The New York Times Magazine’s “The Lives They Lived” feature, which offers remembrances

Lauren Groff In an interview with the Guardian, Claudia Rankine talks about Serena Williams, the reception of her book Citizen, and the difficulties one faces when calling out racism. “When white men are shooting black people, some of it is malice and some an out-of-control image of blackness in their minds. Darren Wilson told the jury that he shot Michael Brown because he looked ‘like a demon.’ And I don’t disbelieve it. Blackness in the white imagination has nothing to do with black people.” Rolling Stone weighs in on the year’s best music books. After parents successfully campaigned to

Langston Hughes Charles F. Harris, an editor and publisher at Doubleday, Random House, and Howard University Press who consistently championed black writing and published Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, and Nikki Giovanni, has died. David Foster Wallace fans (notorious for the strength of their devotion) have been given the chance to redesign the cover of Infinite Jest for its twentieth anniversary next year. The Millions asked his publishers, “What would David have made of that decision?”, but they wisely elected not to guess. It’s time for the New York Times magazine’s feature on those who died this year, including James

Ben Lerner Just two weeks after Sheldon Adelson bought The Las Vegas Review-Journal, the editor, Michael Hengel, has resigned. Hengel told a reporter, “I think my resignation probably comes as a relief to the new owners.” While you’re waiting for Hilary Mantel to finish her third Thomas Cromwell novel, this new short story from the London Review of Books should tide you over. Flavorwire’s Jonathon Sturgeon rounds up the best literary criticism of 2015, including more than a few of our favorites: Dayna Tortorici on Elena Ferrante from n+1, Christian Lorentzen on Jonathan Franzen from New York magazine, an

Meghan Daum The National Endowment for the Arts has awarded $25,000 fellowships to thirty-seven writers, both “emerging and established” (the list includes Meghan Daum, Téa Obreht, Celeste Ng, and Peter Ho Davies). They’ll be propping up the poets next: Applications are due March 9 for the 2017 fellowships. If you didn’t like the sound of working for Amazon, beware the inside of the Washington Post: Jeff Bezos, it seems, is hands-on in his approach there, as in all things. CNN congratulates two reporters on managing to play nicely together after they discovered they were working on the same (very

The Washington Post has canceled its “What Was Fake on the Internet This Week” column. According to Caitlin Dewey, when the paper inaugurated the column in 2014, the goal was to correct misinformation that Internet readers had accepted due to “honest ignorance or misinformation.” This, the paper says, has become impossible—rumors now circulate at a much faster pace, and are therefore difficult to correct. Dewey says that readers, too, have become less interested in the truth, because they are driven by “schadenfreude—even hate.” The Knight Foundation is donating $140,000 to the publishing platform Medium, with the agreement that the

James Laughlin In the wake of the news that Republican super-donor Sheldon Adelson was the man behind the secretive purchase of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, many questions still remain. At Politico, Ken Doctor considers why Adelson paid so much for the paper (a reported $140 million in cash, which is three times what the paper was valued at in March), and what the impact of the sale could be on the news business. The new partnership has not gotten off to an auspicious start: An in-house story about the sale was halted last week by the paper’s publisher so

Molly Crabapple Writer and artist Molly Crabapple, whose just-published memoir Drawing Blood describes her experiences reporting at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere, has published new drawings of Syrian refugees in the Domiz camp in Iraqi Kurdistan. Morrissey has belatedly commented on his debut novel’s victory in this year’s Bad Sex Award, noting that he has “many enemies” of the kind who “try to use all your achievements against you,” and that “there are too many good things in life to let these repulsive horrors pull you down.” There are indeed many good things, and a “giggling snowball of full-figured copulation,”

Marco Rubio In what is perhaps an ominous sign of the times, Merriam Webster has named the suffix ”-ism” as the word of the year. The dictionary reports that words such as racism, fascism, and socialism were often looked up this year, beating out also-rans such as marriage, respect, and inspiration. Meanwhile, Google has posted its “Year in Search” offering a deeper look into the queries on everyone’s mind. After last night’s Republican debate, it might be a good time to revisit Richard Hofstadter’s classic 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” which Harper’s Magazine has helpfully placed

Gabriel García Márquez At the New Republic this week, in two shifts a day from Monday to Friday, ten writers (all women, incidentally) reread Nabokov’s Lolita on the occasion of its sixtieth birthday. The late and formidable literary agent Carmen Balcells and her late and formidable client Gabriel García Márquez get the Vanity Fair treatment. And the New York Timesprofiles Ian Hislop, impish editor of Private Eye, the UK magazine that “combines very funny jokes, many of them unashamedly adolescent, with serious investigative journalism of the kind most British papers no longer do.” Meanwhile, it looks as if a

László Krasznahorkai Author and scholar Benedict Anderson died yesterday in Batu, Malang, East Java. Best known for his influential 1983 study Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, he also wrote many other books, including Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination (2005) and The Fate of Rural Hell: Asceticism and Desire in Buddhist Thailand (2012). Next summer, Verso will publish Anderson’s memoir A Life Beyond the Boundaries. PEN has announced the longlist for its annual translation prize. And in other awards news, Salman Rushdie has been awarded the Mailer Prize for lifetime achievement.  Elusive

Lucia Berlin The New York Times book critics picked their favorite books of the year, and while Michiko Kakutani’s and Janet Maslin’s lists are billed as “roughly in order of preference,” Dwight Garner’s is alphabetized by author: We’d like to think it’s because he couldn’t quite bring himself to choose between the inimitable Joy Williams and the inimitable Lucia Berlin (whom Williams reviews in the latest Bookforum). A new season of Serial—the podcast that put podcasts on the radar for millions of new listeners—has begun, focusing on Bowe Bergdahl, the US soldier who left his post and spent several

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Time magazine has an excerpt from Open Letter, the posthumously published manifesto by Charlie Hebdo’s editor-in-chief, Stéphane Charbonnier, who was killed in the January attack. In this controversial passage from the book, due out in English next month, Charbonnier lays out his objections to the term Islamophobia, which he claims obscures the underlying problems of racism and discrimination against the poor. Jane Hu looks around the archive of the great queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (kept in her Manhattan apartment until an institution decides to acquire it), and talks to Sedgwick’s husband, Hal, who maintains it: “I