Emma Straub. Photo: Jennifer Bastian “There are plenty of things to feel guilty about in life—yelling at your kid, not putting a shopping cart back in the parking lot, sleeping with your best friend’s spouse—why put that on reading? If I could absolve readers of one thing, it would be this—feeling guilt about books that they like, and books that they don’t,” Emma Straub tells Literary Hub. “Ditch the guilt! Embrace excitement, and glee, about all the books you still have to read for the very first time.” The New York Times Book Review rounds up the best of

Curtis Sittenfeld The nominees for this year’s AKO Caine Prize for African Writing were announced yesterday. Nominees include Erica Sugo Anyadike, Irenosen Okojie, and Jowhor Ile. The winner will be announced this fall. Curtis Sittenfeld takes the Lit Hub Questionnaire. She says if she wasn’t a writer she would have wanted to become a doctor and hopes that female politicians like Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Kamala Harris will read her new novel, Rodham. “I’d love to know what they think I got right or wrong about women and politics.” “I’ve plunged into a world of online bookishness over

Kiley Reid. Photo: David Goddard The New York Public Library has announced the finalists for the 2020 Young Lions Fiction Award. The nominees are Bryan Washington’s Lot, Xuan Juliana Wang’s Home Remedies, Steph Cha’s Your House Will Pay, Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age, and Julia Phillips’s Disappearing Earth. Sports writer Jeff Benedict is working on a new book about the New England Patriots. The Dynasty will be published by Avid Reader Press in September. The Association of American Publishers has released data on book sales during March. While overall sales fell by 8 percent, audiobook sales rose by

Maggie Doherty. Photo: Max Larkin At Literary Hub, Maggie Doherty writes about the history of creative communities. “Writers and artists have often come together to create formal and informal communities. Some did so spontaneously; others worked through existing institutions; still others created institutions of their own,” she writes. “These creative communities mimicked the conditions of the MFA program and the artist colony: long stretches of alone time punctuated by intense, intimate gatherings.” The New York Times’s Alexandra Alter looks at the publishing industry’s “quickly assembled” books on coronavirus that will be coming out later this year. “Three months into

Susan Bernofsky. Photo: Caroline White The Authors Guild and the National Book Critics Circle have written an open letter to newspapers and other media companies, encouraging “those outlets to continue to make space for the vital conversation around books in their coverage.” “Strong literary arts coverage not only benefits authors, but nourishes the entire literary ecosystem, including freelance reviewers, publishers, bookstores, libraries, literary agencies, editors, designers and everyone who contributes in one way or another to the world of books.” Ben Smith, the New York Times’ media columnist, questions Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and Catch and Kill author Ronan Farrow’s

Bryan Washington. Photo: David Gracia This year’s Dylan Thomas Prize has been awarded to Bryan Washington’s short story collection, Lot. Nieman Lab’s Sarah Scire talks to Atlantic executive editor Adrienne LaFrance about conspiracy theories and her recent reporting about QAnon. “Often we encounter absurdities and the impulse can be to wave it away and say, ‘Okay, if we ignore that thing that seems harmful or ridiculous, eventually it’ll peter out.’ But that was also something that people said about birtherism and now Donald Trump is the president. Anyone who can agree that conspiracy theories are harmful for democratic society

Sofia Coppola. Photo: Georges Biard Netflix is working with Italian production company Fandango to adapt Elena Ferrante’s latest novel, The Lying Life of Adults, into a streaming series. In other adaptation news, Apple TV+ and Sofia Coppola are working on a limited series based on Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country. Columbia Journalism Review’s MSNBC public editor Maria Bustillos questions the network’s choice to report on the use of remdesivir to treat COVID-19 without investigating the reasons behind its promotion. “It’s not unreasonable for Dr. Fauci and other scientific researchers to express optimism—to be what you might call

Jenny Zhang Simon Schuster publisher and CEO Carolyn Reidy died yesterday at the age of seventy-one. Reidy had been with the company for almost twenty years, and worked with writers from Hillary Clinton to Jennifer Weiner. “Carolyn was a literary giant, a leader who artfully navigated the upheavals of publishing to amplify a wide range of voices reflective of our lived world,” PEN America president Jennifer Egan remembered. “Carolyn believed in every story she touched, and ushered our works into the wider world with passion, care, and decades of expertise.” Haruki Murakami is hosting a radio show during Japan’s

Lydia Millet. Photo: J. Beall Nieman Lab’s Laura Hazard Owen talks to The 19th cofounder Emily Ramshaw about launching the news site in the middle of a pandemic and why political reporting is more important than ever. The nonprofit news site was announced in January and will still be launched this summer. “For us, the primary obsession this summer and into the fall will be the politics of the pandemic and what that means for women — deeply exploring the ways in which women are disproportionately affected by this moment, which may be a heck of a lot longer

Yiyun Li. Photo: Denise Applewhite Every morning, Robert Caro gets up early, works on the fifth and final volume of his massive Lyndon B. Johnson biography, and walks through Central Park. “He’s in a moment of crisis,” Caro says of the late-career LBJ that will be covered in this volume of the biography. “I’m trying to show in this section of this book what it’s like to be president of the United States when everything is going wrong.” The book is highly anticipated. “As great as his [Caro’s] earlier books have been, this is the culmination, the one many

Garth Greenwell. Photo: Bill Adams The 2020 Jackson Poetry Prize has been awarded to Ed Roberson. “This is an extraordinary time to be awarding this significant prize in poetry, a momentous time in our recent history, a time of panic, fear, uncertainty and inner turmoil, and devastating tragedy where people are separated from one another, cannot even touch or bury loved ones, and yet are bound together inextricably by their vulnerability as humans,” the judges said in a press release. “Poetry such as Ed Roberson’s troubles these meditations, these issues, these apocalyptic queries in innovative expressive ways.” Over half

Elif Shafak. Photo: Zeynel Abidin The PEN America World Voices festival is moving online. Podcasts, videos, interviews, and other live events on the theme of “These Truths” will be available on the groups website over the next few weeks. “In an era when the agreed-upon factual basis of our daily news is constantly undermined, there has never been a greater need for us to hear the deeper truths afforded by literature,” they said. “This virtual edition of America’s premier international literary festival will engage with contested histories and memory, challenge the fabrications of truth served to us on an

Susan Choi. Photo: Heather Weston In France, a page on a government website that purportedly pointed out misinformation about coronavirus in the French media was taken down. The site was removed after the the Syndicat National des Journalists union complained that it was an attack on press freedom. The union representing newsroom employees of the Tribune Publishing Group—which owns the Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore Sun, the Hartford Courant and many other papers—is trying to unseat two board members representing Alden Global Capital. The hedge fund, which took a 32 percent share in the group in November, is the largest

Ben Moser The winners of this year’s Pulitzer Prizes were announced yesterday. Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys won the prize for fiction, Benjamin Moser’s Sontag won the biography prize, and Anne Boyer’s The Undying and Greg Grandin’s The End of the Myth both won the general nonfiction prize. Percival Everett tells the New York Times why readers might disagree about the events of his most recent novel, Telephone. Everett and publisher Graywolf released three different versions of the novel, and there’s no way for readers to choose which one they get. “It’s going to piss a lot of people

Jessica Winter. Photo: Adrian Kinloch The Pulitzer Prizes—originally scheduled for April 20 but delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic—will be announced today at 3pm EST. The new Yale Review—the second since its restart with author Meghan O’Rourke as editor—is out now, and features work by Eileen Myles, Jess Row, Jenny Xie, Major Jackson, and others. Viking has announced that it will publish The Searcher, a new thriller by bestselling author Tana French, on October 6. (At Literary Hub, Emily Temple collects all the information about the book that she can find.) In other book news, the New Yorker’s Jessica

Joy Harjo. Photo: Matika Wilbur Joy Harjo has been named US Poet Laureate for the second time. Harjo plans to spend her second term focusing on creating “a digital interactive map featuring contemporary Native poets, including videos of them reading their work.” The New York Times’s Gal Beckerman analyzes celebrity bookshelves as they appear in quarantine broadcasts. “A stranger’s collection is to us a window to their soul,” he writes. “We peruse with judgment, sometimes admiration and occasionally repulsion.” Read an excerpt from Greil Marcus’s new book, Under the Red White and Blue: Patriotism, Disenchantment and the Stubborn Myth

Tana French Tana French has announced a new novel. The Searcher, which follows a retired detective living in Ireland who returns to work “when a local kid alerts him to his brother’s disappearance,” will be published by Viking in October. French tells Entertainment Weekly that she was inspired to write the new book by her last novel, The Witch Elm. “So much of it was about what was going on inside the narrator’s head. . . . The character in The Witch Elm just goes through this arc from being the golden boy to being a wreck,” she said.

Lisa Napoli At The Ringer, an appreciation of the late True Grit author Charles Portis: “His novels are marvelous odysseys into the dark heart of WTF.” After a public backlash, the media company Axios has decided to return its Paycheck Protection Program loan, a federal grant designed to help small businesses avoid layoffs. According to cofounder Jim VandeHei, Axios is close to completing a deal for an “alternative source of capital.” VandeHei explained: “The program has become divisive, turning into a public debate about the worthiness of specific industries or companies. . . . While applying for the loan

Nicole R. Fleetwood A previously unpublished novel by Simone de Beauvoir will be released in France this fall and in the US next year. Beauvoir worked on The Inseparables for a few months in 1954 and then abandoned the project when Jean-Paul Sartre said it was no good. Toril Moi, author of Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman, told the New York Times why she thinks Beauvoir never finished the book: “Why did she so readily agree with Sartre? I don’t think it’s the prose. . . . She judged it insignificant because it was not

Sarah Manguso. Photo: Joel Brouwer Today at 12pm EST, as part of Pandemonium U, Benjamin Moser, the author of Sontag and Why This World, will participate in a conversation titled “How to Write a Biography” with author Pamela Druckerman (There Are No Grown-Ups Around). Among the questions he will address: “What’s it like to be a man who writes about women? Why are women’s life stories different from those of men? How does Ben choose his subjects, and what’s it like to spend years immersed in their diaries and emails?” Anyone can “attend” using Zoom. Sarah Manguso, author of