Andrew Sullivan Author and blogger Andrew Sullivan says he’s currently working on a book about Christianity. Today is is the day that Joshua Cohen—the Harper’s book reviewer and the author, most recently, of the novel Book of Numbers—will begin rewriting Charles Dickens’s debut novel, The Pickwick Papers. Cohen will write his book, PCKWCK, online, for five hours a day, and visitors to the site will be able to watch his writing appear in real time. Visitors will also be able to offer feedback. Cohen’s fiction has been suspicious of online “crowds,” and the author’s interactions with his audience will be,

Keith Gessen Two of Svetlana Alexievich’s translators responded in the Guardian to yesterday’s announcement that she had won the Nobel Prize in Literature: Bela Shayevich, who’s at work on an English version of Second-hand Time, her “collection of oral histories from the dissolution of the Soviet Union to the anti-Putin protests of 2012,” quoted from Alexievich’s introduction: “History’s sole concern is the facts; emotions are outside of its realm of interest. . . . But I look at the world as a writer, and not strictly an historian.” And Keith Gessen (who translated Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History

Svetlana Alexievich The Belarusian writer and journalist Svetlana Alexievich, the bookies’ favorite, has won this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature for her “polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage.” “Life offers so many versions and interpretations of the same events that neither fiction nor document alone can keep up with its variety,” she told an interviewer when her oral history Voices from Chernobyl was published. “I felt compelled to find a different narrative strategy. I decided to collect the voices from the street, the material lying about around me. Each person offers a text of his or her

Joshua Cohen If the premise of Stephen King’s Misery always struck you as an appealing one, now—or next week—is your moment. Starting Monday, the publishers of the newborn Useless Press (which aims to make “internet things” more interesting than the usual) will be metaphorically chaining the novelist Joshua Cohen to his desk, where he’ll spend his afternoons writing a novel live online for a week, subjected to feedback from readers every morning as the text emerges. If Charles Dickens had had an anxiety dream while writing the Pickwick Papers, it might have looked something like this: For five hours

Henning Mankell Best-selling Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell, who created the character of Kurt Wallander, died yesterday at age sixty-seven. The Guardian noted that he “took the existing Swedish tradition of crime writing as a form of leftwing social criticism and gave it international recognition,” and the Los Angeles Times looked back at its own reviews of Mankell over the years, including one from 2006 that rather winningly admired his resistance to the “tendency among some Scandinavian writers (think Ibsen, Strindberg) to cast a sense of gloom over their works.” A Mother Jones reporter charged with trespassing at a

Ira Silverberg Ira Silverberg—who has been the editor in chief of Grove Press, an agent at Donadio Olson and at Sterling Lord Literistic, and the Literature Director of the National Endowment of for the Arts—has started a new position as senior editor at Simon  Schuster. In a new essay, author Jedediah Purdy dwells on the similarities between Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me and Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels: “They are representative work for a time when representation—politically, aesthetically—is at its most fraught, in speaking for others and also in putting forward one’s self.” When a journalist recently asked

In the wake of another mass shooting, this time at a college campus in Oregon, there has been disagreement over how journalists should proceed in reporting such events immediately after the fact, especially when using social media. In responding to the events in Oregon, the president made a statement that Vox calls “as angry as Obama publicly gets”: “We know that other countries, in response to one mass shooting, have been able to craft laws that almost eliminate mass shootings. . . . So we know there are ways to prevent it. And, of course, what’s also routine is that

Valeria Luiselli You can read Andrew Roberts’s review of Niall Ferguson’s authorized Henry Kissinger biography in this Sunday’s New York TimesBook Review. But you might want to prepare first by reading this review of the review by Greg Grandin, author of a more critical Kissinger biography. He points out that the Times’s usual rules on conflicts of interest ought to preclude assigning this one to Roberts, an old friend of both the book’s author and its subject (Kissinger, in fact, originally asked Roberts to write the biography himself): “The Times might as well have asked Kissinger to review his

Julie Schumacher Poets and wits may lose their advantage on Twitter if people no longer have to abide by the 140-character limit (it could well happen). The German publisher Axel Springer, which earlier this year teamed up with Politico on its make-Brussels-sexy European operation and recently lost out on a deal for the Financial Times, has just bought Business Insider for $343 million. Speaking of Politico, you may have missed its plan to save or eat journalism over the next five years. See the founders’ memo to staff: “Our dream is a Politico journalistic presence in every capital of

Ben Lerner The latest MacArthur “genius grants” have been announced, and the twenty-four new fellows include the writers Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ben Lerner, who told a reporter that getting the no-strings award, which pays out $625,000 over the course of five years, “takes away all your excuses to not be doing the most ambitious work.” The New York Times mourns the end of “tabloid culture”: After massive layoffs, which came on September 16 “with the swiftness of a Soviet-era purge” the Daily News is completing its transformation from, as former News columnist Michael Daly put it, “a New York

Lucia Berlin In an excerpt from her forthcoming book, M Train, Patti Smith explains how she gained admittance into the Continental Drift Club, “an obscure society serving as an independent branch of the earth-science community.” She was invited to join the society, much to her surprise, after sending written requests to photograph the boots of the CDC’s founder, the explorer Alfred Wegener. “I am certain I didn’t quite meet their criteria, but I suspect that after some deliberation they welcomed me due to my abundance of romantic enthusiasm. I became an official member in 2006.” The winners of the fifteenth

Roberto Saviano While we’re on the subject of ego and bombast, Morrissey has written a novel, and no one seems very happy about it (except perhaps those critics who got to single out its “most Morrissey lines” for ridicule). From the Guardian: “Do not read this book; do not sully yourself with it, no matter how temptingly brief it seems. All those who shepherded it to print should hang their heads in shame, for it’s hard to imagine anything this bad has been put between covers by anyone other than a vanity publisher.” You can tell that Jorge Luis

James Patterson The two Al Jazeera journalists who were imprisoned in Egypt for over a year have been pardoned and released. Turns out bookish people still like books: Print sales seem to be recovering and, as one bookstore owner tells the New York Times, “The e-book terror has kind of subsided.” The e-reading subscription service Oyster, which is shutting down, its staff apparently moving to Google, nonetheless maintains that “the phone will be the primary reading device globally over the next decade.” Whoever is right, as László Krasznahorkai pointed out last weekend at the Brooklyn Book Festival, “Devices are

Ta-Nehisi Coates It’s been announced that Ta-Nehisi Coates, hailed by Toni Morrison as an intellectual heir to James Baldwin, will continue to use his powers for good—a longtime |http://www.vulture.com/2015/04/ta-nehisi-coates-superhero-comics.html?mid=twitter_vulture#|comic-book fan|, Coates is to write a new Black Panther series for Marvel, starting next spring. The character, created in 1966, was the first black superhero, and this assignment doesn’t strike Coates as a departure from his previous work: “I don’t experience the stuff I write about as weighty,” he told the New York Times. “I feel a strong need to express something. The writing usually lifts the weight. I expect

David Cameron An unauthorized biography of British Prime Minister David Cameron, Call Me Dave, is continuing to dominate headlines in the UK. Cowritten by Lord Ashcroft, a former Conservative Party treasurer and major party donor who is apparently sad about not getting the government job he was promised, the book is the source of the so-called Prosciutto Affair, which has spawned countless memes over the last couple of days. On this side of the Atlantic, some are already attempting to take the #piggate scandal seriously, and understand what it might tell us about today’s politics: “It’s a community of

Geoff Dyer The Brooklyn Book Festival celebrated its tenth anniversary yesterday with a full day of author panels and other events—all of which concluded with a Ping Pong tournament, of course. Contestants included Jonathan Lethem, Fiona Maazel, PEN’s Paul Morris, Pico Iyer, Robert Christgau, Marlon James, David Simon, and Geoff Dyer, who reached the final round to play New York Public Library’s Paul Holdengraber, who had earlier in the day interviewed Salman Rushdie. Dyer won. The poet C.K. Williams, whose many honors include a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, died yesterday. He was seventy-eight. Author Richard Dawkins,

Nell Zink As of yesterday, the fiction longlist for the National Book Award is out, and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life made it, as did Nell Zink’s Mislaid. Layoffs, layoffs, everywhere (at the Daily News, the Post reports, quoting an “insider,” it’s no longer like rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic so much as being “ripped in two like the Titanic just before it sank”). If you’re looking to do a reverse Michael Derrick Hudson, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop can help. Meanwhile, the writer Mira Jacob gave a speech at a Publishers Weeklyevent on Wednesday, but not enough

Ta-Nehisi Coates The perks of being owned by Jeff Bezos: Amazon Prime members will now be automatic digital subscribers to the Washington Post (for an initial six-month period). That promises a big leap in readership, which, the Washingtonian notes, “plays into the Post’s grander plan of trying to become the newspaper brand for a national—and perhaps international—audience, a fight it’s in with the New York Times and USA Today.” The Post, incidentally, |http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/09/16/annotated-transcript-september-16-gop-debate/#|has an annotated transcript| of last night’s Republican debate, if you like that sort of thing. Amid much authorial nail-biting, the New Yorker will today announce the longlist for

Hanya Yanagihara After yesterday’s announcement of the Booker Prize shortlist, the bookies’ favorite is Hanya Yanagihara’s harrowing A Little Life (reviewed in Bookforum’s summer issue). It’s an interesting list: Marilynne Robinson didn’t make it, and Tom McCarthy is the only previously shortlisted writer who did; the others are Marlon James, Chigozie Obioma, Sunjeev Sahota, and Anne Tyler. Trouble at the L.A. Times: The owner, Tribune Publishing, after firing the paper’s publisher last week over a host of internal disputes, apparently plans to save around $10 million in editorial expenses, cutting some eighty newsroom jobs. Mary Karr has just published

Joan Didion For readers, there’s a bright side to the Best American Poetry debacle—a flood of recommendations for “actual Asian poets” (and a somewhat chilling insight into the experience of non-white writers in prestigious MFA programs).  At New York, Christian Lorentzen mounts a masterful defense of Joan Didion from the current tendency to split her into separate Didions (and dismiss some of her best work). Lorentzen, incidentally, presents his credentials early on: “Having read that Didion used to type out Hemingway to learn how to write, in my 20s I did the same. Then I just switched to Didion.