The novelist Marilynne Robinson has received a lifetime achievement award from the Library of Congress. The prize, which honors writers who express “something new about the American experience,” has previously been given to Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, and Philip Roth.
Stephen Glass, the former journalist caught fabricating multiple stories in the 1990s, now claims to have repaid with interest the publications he wrote for, including the New Republic, Harper’s, and Rolling Stone, to the tune of $200,000.
Things to look forward to in the near future include Rivka Galchen’s piece on Hillary Clinton (presumably the last in the New Republic’s “Field Portraits” series, which has so far given us Joshua Cohen on Bernie Sanders, Suki Kim on Marco Rubio, Clancy Martin on Ted Cruz, and Patricia Lockwood reporting from Trumplandia) and Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s cameo performance in The Merchant of Venice.
Lydia Kiesling has taken over as editor of The Millions.
ProPublica’s Alex MacGillis has won the Toner Prize for political reporting for a group of 2015 stories that, as Tom Brokaw (one of this year’s judges) put it, helps explain “what everyone wants to know: what happened to our system of politics and governance.” And Atlantic Media announced the finalists for its Michael Kelly Award (for “the fearless pursuit and expression of truth”), which will be given on April 17.
For the Paris Review Daily, the artist Aidan Koch adapts a Lydia Davis story into a (delightful) comic.
At Lincoln Center in April, as part of its Print Screen series, writer and performer Jacob Wren (whose new book, Rich and Poor, is about a man who decides to assassinate a billionaire) will introduce a screening of Abbas Kiarostami’s 1990 film Close-up, which he calls “a film taking its first impulse from a real life story in the newspaper that is at the same time a film about dreams.” Wren continues: “What would our dreams be like if there were no newspapers, no television or advertising, no books or films? Our dreams are compromised in ways we cannot even know the true extent of.”