The International Booker Prize shortlist was released this morning. Nominees include Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s The Discomfort of Evening, Yoko Ogowa’s The Memory Police, and Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season. The winner will be announced in May.
The judges for the 2020 National Book Awards were announced yesterday. Judges include Roxane Gay, Rebecca Makkai, Terry Tempest Williams, and John Darnielle, who Literary Hub notes is likely “the first ever bonafide rock star judge” in the awards’ history.
PEN America is relaunching the Writers’ Emergency Fund. Grants from $500 to $1,000 are available to writers based in the US that can “demonstrate that a small, one-time grant will be meaningful in helping them to address an emergency situation.”
At the New York Times, Kara Swisher reflects on her Fox News–obsessed mother’s journey from denying the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic to understanding the seriousness of the disease. “To my surprise, as the pandemic has worsened, my mother started to listen to other sources of information, like her children and other news outlets,” she writes. “She now seems to realize that she bears some of the burden as a news consumer, though she remains a Fox News acolyte.”
For Columbia Journalism Review, podcast producer Martine Powers describes the challenges of podcasting from home during the pandemic.
At the Los Angeles Times, Wendy Paris wonders why marijuana dispensaries are considered “essential services” while bookstores are not. “Books are essential goods and that ought to mean bookstores are exempt from shutting down during the coronavirus pandemic,” she argues. “As are bread and milk, gas and aspirin, alcohol and marijuana, books should be available, with safety precautions in place, at the usual places we buy them in our neighborhoods.”
Literary Hub’s Dan Sheehan looks to Flann O’Brien’s publishing history to comfort writers whose books are being published during the COVID-19 pandemic. O’Brien’s At Swim Two Birds was published in 1939, as World War Two began in Europe. Although the novel sold only 300 copies that year, O’Brien’s work has become a classic. “No matter how tumultuous and destructive the storm into which your book is born may seem, it too shall pass, and when it does what you’ve created will still be standing,” he writes. “You must believe that your work will survive this; that even if its beginnings are inauspicious, your work will be rediscovered over and over again.”