Ohio University has decided to remove alumnus and former Fox News president Roger Ailes’s name from a student newsroom at the school, and will return the $500,000 donation Ailes made in 2007. Scholarships awarded in Ailes’s name will continue.
The Man Booker Prize shortlist has been announced. Finalists include Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk, Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project, Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen, David Szalay’s All That Man Is, and Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing. At a press conference, the prize’s literary director Gaby Wood responded to criticism of the longlist’s lack of diversity.
The National Book Awards poetry longlist has been announced. Finalists include Solmaz Sharif’s Look, Monica Youn’s Blackacre, and Kevin Young’s Blue Laws.
Rupi Kaur’s initially self-published poetry collection Milk and Honey has now sold over half a million copies. First released in 2014, the book made it onto the New York Times’s bestseller list earlier this year. Kirsty Melville, publisher and president of Andrews McMeel Publishing, said, “Poetry, as short form writing, fits with how people are reading today.”
Novelist and keynote speaker Lionel Shriver has been disavowed by the Brisbane Writers Festival for her speech that “belittled the movement against cultural appropriation.” Shriver wore a sombrero during parts of her speech, and responded to criticism of her choice to write a black woman character “kept on a leash by her homeless white husband” in The Mandibles. Links to Shriver’s speech were removed from the festival’s website, although information about a response by writers Suki Kim and Yassmin Abdel-Magied remains.
Tonight in Brooklyn, Bushwick Book Club presents “new song, dance and film inspired by Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude” at the Archway Under the Manhattan Bridge; Michelle Tea talks to Isaac Fitzgerald about her new book Black Wave at Powerhouse Arena; and Mara Wilson, better known as Matilda, reads from her memoir Where Am I Now?: True Stories of Girlhood and Accidental Fame.