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

Danez Smith. Photo: Hieu Minh Nguyen The New York Times will stop printing the “Travel” and “Sports” sections in their Sunday edition. The paper is starting a new “At Home” supplement, a lifestyle section for the quarantined. A note to staff from executive editor Dean Baquet and managing editor Joseph Kahn said, “The extraordinary nature of this moment has driven remarkable changes in our journalism. . . . It has also caused us to rethink the way we produce traditional elements of the news report and, in particular, the structure of the print newspaper.” On Literary Hub’s Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast,

Barton Gellman. Photo: Robin Davis Miller The staff of Wired has unionized with NewsGuild of New York, the Daily Beast reports. Employees had been organizing for over a year and decided to move forward with the union after parent company Condé Nast announced cuts due to the COVID-19 pandemic. “If we can preempt the inevitable cuts by even a matter of days and help get laid off workers better severances, or turn some of these layoffs into cuts that are spread across high paid workers’ salaries, or turn them into furloughs, or at least be able to talk about

Bernardine Evaristo. Photo: Jennie Scott The Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist was announced yesterday. The finalists are Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other, Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light, Jenny Offill’s Weather, Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, Natalie Haynes’s A Thousand Ships, and Angie Cruz’s Dominicana. The winner will be announced in September. Longtime Random House editor Robert Loomis died earlier this week at the age of 93. Small Press Distribution has started a GoFundMe campaign to make up for lost revenue during the COVID-19 pandemic. “Although it’s true that books can’t help materially, we believe that reading can expand the

Sopan Deb. Photo: Amy Lombard Malcolm Harris has sold a new book to Little, Brown. The Ghosts of Palo Alto will be “a mix of California history and memoir” that explores “Harris’s hometown, a national center of wealth accumulation, elite education, and teen suicide” and uncovers “a 150-year legacy of eugenics and mass murder at the foundation of Silicon Valley.” The Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize shortlist was announced yesterday. Finalists include Tishani Doshi’s Small Days and Nights, Elif Shafak’s 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, and Robert Macfarlane’s Underland. The winner will be announced May

Brit Bennett. Photo: Emma Trim Riverhead Books has started a new online author series called “I’m Glad You Asked.” The first episode allows you to eavesdrop on a phone call between Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror, and Brit Bennett, whose novels include The Mothers and The Vanishing Half, which is due out in June. The LA Times Book Prizes have been announced. An archive of Ariana Reines’s inspired project “Rilking”—in which the poet and a number of readers gathered on Zoom to explore the mysterious reaches of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies—is now available online. Colm Tóibín recommends

Margaret Atwood. Photo: Jean Malek An adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex has been announced by Paramount Television Studios. Fifty Shades of Grey director Sam Taylor-Johnson will direct the project. Eugenides’s 2002 novel has been making the rounds in Hollywood for more than a decade, after a much-hyped 2009 HBO series never came to fruition. At Literary Hub, an interview with Thom Stead, the man behind the Instagram account Read Books, Serve Looks. Lambda Literary has championed LGBTQ voices in the literary community for thirty-plus years. While their annual awards, the Lammys, will still be announced online this June, the

Ottessa Moshfegh. Photo: Larry D. Moore At the New York Times, Lauren Christensen talks to Ottessa Moshfegh about loss, the need to be liked, and her upcoming book, Death in Her Hands. “People don’t want to talk about how they relate to a character’s more unsavory qualities,” she said of readers’ reactions to her novels, “so they’re like, ‘God, she was really gross.’ Everybody’s so obsessed with being liked.” The New York Public Library is listing the top books that New Yorkers are checking out online during the pandemic. Favorite titles include Sally Rooney’s Normal People, James McBride’s Deacon

Jess Hill. Photo: Jack Fisher See What You Made Me Do, Jess Hill’s study of domestic violence, has won this year’s Stella Prize. Chelsea Bieker, Maya Shanbhag Lang, Marie Mutsuki Mockett, David Moloney, and TaraShea Nesbit answer the Lit Hub Author Questionnaire. Bieker voiced frustration that many of her Goodreads reviews complained about too many “bad things” happening to her characters. “I will stop writing about the oppression and heinous violence enacted upon women when oppression and heinous violence ceases happening to women,” she said. Mockett said that “age and parenting” have helped her get over the worry that

Wendy Liu Poets Writers has created a COVID-19 Relief Fund to offer emergency assistance to writers affected by the pandemic. The first round of funding will provide eighty writers with grants of up to $1,000. Condé Nast is cutting salaries of all employees making over $100,000 and will reduce hours for other staff, the New York Times reports. At Literary Hub, Jenny Odell and Wendy Liu discuss technology, our current political moment, and the similarities between their respective recent books, How to Do Nothing and Abolish Silicon Valley. “We have to hope that there is a future beyond the

Ling Ma. Photo: Anjali Pinto After more than a decade of silence, the New York Ghost—the literary newsletter created by novelist Ed Park—has reappeared with a new issue, featuring original work by Ling Ma, Julia Kardon, Lucas Adams, and Courtney Dodson. The legendary Bay Area bookseller City Lights, currently closed due to the coronavirus, was on the verge of closing for good. But then customers donated more than $365,000 in a single day. David Quammen—author of the excellent 2012 book Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic as well as a study of Ebola—has sold a book about

Sigrid Nunez. Photo: Nancy Crampton This year’s Guggenheim Fellows were announced yesterday. Literary Hub has a list of all the writers who received a grant this year, including Rebecca Mead, Yiyun Li, Sigrid Nunez, and more. Italian publishers and writers are rushing to publish books about the country’s coronavirus epidemic. Some authors, like essayist Paolo Giordano, wrote books in less than a month, while others have added new chapters and moved up publication dates for books that were scheduled to come out later this year. “Italy is a laboratory. Think of the singalongs from the balconies or the celebrities’

Morgan Jerkins Nadxieli Nieto is joining Flatiron as an editor at large. Formerly the PEN America literary awards program director, Nieto will focus on literary fiction, nonfiction, and young adult literature by Latinx and BIPoC authors. At Jewish Currents, Mairav Zonszein talks to writers and editors who have been affected by COVID-19. “When you work in media and people start talking about a recession, you know that’s not good news for the industry,” said Brandy Jensen, an editor who was recently laid off with the rest of the staff at The Outline. “The paradox of how media is funded

Annie Ernaux The shortlist for the 2020 Dylan Thomas Prize was announced yesterday. Nominees include Bryan Washington’s Lot, Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, and Téa Obreht’s Inland. The winner will be announced in May. The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded $22 million in grants. Funded projects include a dictionary of Choctaw dialects, a documentary about public libraries, and a study of responses to the 1918 influenza epidemic in Europe. The Pulitzer Prize Board has postponed the announcement of this year’s winners. Administrator Dana Canedy explained the decision in a press release. “The Pulitzer board includes

Chloe Aridjis. This month, The Atlantic has set a new traffic record for their website, with eighty-seven million unique pageviews, which is more than double than their previous high mark. The magazine also had thirty-six thousand new subscribers over the past four weeks. The 2020 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction has been given to Chloe Aridjis for her novel Sea Monsters. The other finalists were: Yiyun Li’s Where Reasons End, Peter Rock’s The Night Swimmers, Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s We Cast a Shadow, and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. The authors will be honored in a video that will

Cheryl Strayed. Photo: Joni Kabana/Knopf Actor and writer Patricia Bosworth has died from complications caused by the coronavirus. She was eighty-six. Her books include the memoir Anything Your Little Heart Desires and biographies of Diane Arbus, Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda, and Montgomery Clift. Wild author Cheryl Strayed has started a great new weekly podcast called Sugar Calling. “Each week, Cheryl will call a writer she admires in search of insight and courage,” says the New York Times. “She’s turning to some of the most prolific writers of our time—all over the age of 60—to ask the questions on all

Min Jin Lee On But That’s Another Story, Will Schwalbe talks to Min Jin Lee about growing up in Queens, how George Eliot inspired her writing, and her new book, Free Food for Millionaires. “George Eliot’s attitude is, if you don’t know, you have to look it up,” she explained. “And I think in a way, her audacity and her brazenness has given me kind of a courage to use Korean words in my work, which I think are worth becoming loan words in English.” Folio has collected a list of resources for freelance journalists, including organizations offering grants

Fernanda Melchor 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

Samantha Irby. Photo: Eva Blue Wow, No Thank You author Samantha Irby tells Literary Hub about late night writing, Gone Girl, and who she wants to read her book. “If I am being honest, and completely vulnerable, I would say that I hope that people I used to be friends with, people I was very close to with whom I shared big parts of my life and whose friendships I squandered or fucked up or ruined in some way, I hope that those handful of people have maybe read something I’ve written and seen that I turned out okay,”

Namwali Serpell. Photo: Peg Skorpinski “Bookstores are the kind of lifelines that often go unnoticed, are underestimated, are underutilized. We serve ideas and people. Ideas and people. We are so much more than just commerce,” writes Lucy Kogler. “And that is why once this crisis is contained, over, something… we will—with the help of the government—be able to rebound.” The winners of this year’s Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards were announced yesterday. Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift won the fiction prize, Charles King’s Gods of the Upper Air won the nonfiction prize, Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic won the poetry prize, and