The 2020 Whiting Award winners were announced yesterday. Andrea Lawlor, Ling Ma, and Genevieve Sly Crane won for fiction, while Jacquira Díaz and Jia Tolentino won for nonfiction.
On the Reading Women podcast, Kendra Winchester talks to Emily St. John Mandel about ghost stories, crime fiction, and her new book, The Glass Hotel. Mandel originally set out to write a novel based on the crimes of Bernie Madoff, but the narrative shifted as she wrote. “When I sent an early draft of this novel to my agent a couple of years ago, one of the questions for her was, ‘Are there too many ghosts?’ Because there are, like, six, which kind of worried me,” she recalled. “It began as one thing and kind of morphed into another over time.”
Sales of paperback fiction in the UK have increased by 35 percent in the last week, The Guardian reports.
Bookshop.org is hosting an online storefront staffed by unemployed booksellers from the Strand, McNally Jackson, and more.
BuzzFeed is cutting employee salaries by up to 25 percent. The cuts will be made based on income, with all employees earning less than $65,000 receiving a five-percent reduction. CEO Jonah Peretti will not be taking his salary during this time.
Because of increased reporting on the spread of coronavirus, the BBC has postponed plans to lay off 450 employees.
Haley Mlotek is joining SSENSE as a senior editor.
For Literary Hub, Lynne Tillman reflects on books, distractions, and the revolutionary act of leaving your home. “In a room, I think about what I will do, myself, about others. I remember others, memory includes others, friends lovers sisters father mother ex-friends,” she writes. “Figures in mind, like Kafka, who abjures himself, and the dead, they live with me now.”
At the New York Times Magazine, deputy editor Jessica Lustig reflects on caring for her husband, who was diagnosed with COVID-19 last week. “It’s as if we are in a time warp, in which we have accelerated at 1½ time speed, while everyone around us remains in the present — already the past to us — and they, blissfully, unconsciously, go about their ordinary lives,” she writes, “experiencing the growing news, the more urgent advisories and directives, as a vast communal experience, sharing posts and memes about cabin fever, about home-schooling, about social distancing, about how hard it all is, while we’re living in our makeshift sick ward, living in what will soon be the present for more and more of them.”