Powell’s Books. Photo: Wikicommons / Cacophony On Friday, Powell’s Books, which laid off most of its workers earlier this month, has rehired more than one hundred employees to help meet the demands created by an upsurge in online book sales. Meg LaBorde Kuehn, the CEO of Kirkus Media, has written an open letter announcing that digital subscriptions to Kirkus magazine are now free. “Our mandate, now and always, is simple: help our community of book lovers discover the best new reads and stay ahead of the curve.” As bookstores close, authors cancel book tours, conferences get delayed (Book Expo

Jordan Kisner. Photo: Ebru Yildiz How to Be an Artist author Jerry Saltz explains how to channel stress into creativity. “Never, ever think about creating something good. Good is boring,” he told the New York Times’s Elisabeth Egan. “Ninety-five percent of what I write is crapola and I just cut it to find the 5 percent that might be worth putting out into the world. You have to open up and pursue that kind of radical vulnerability.” Thirty thousand people have joined Patreon as creators in the last three weeks. Jordan Kisner shares what she’s reading during quarantine. “My

Emily St. John Mandel. Photo: Sarah Shatz 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,

Cameron Esposito. Photo: Robyn Von Swank The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post have signed an open letter to the Chinese government asking them to reconsider their decision to remove American journalists. “This move — made in retaliation for recent expulsions by the United States government — is one that we would protest under any circumstances,” they wrote. “But it is uniquely damaging and reckless as the world continues the struggle to control this disease, a struggle that will require the free flow of reliable news and information.” The White House Correspondents’ Association has enacted strict

Valeria Luiselli. Photo: Diego Berruecos/Gatopardo Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive has won the Rathbones Folio Prize. The Guardian notes that Luiselli is the first women to win the prize in its seven-year history. The awards ceremony was canceled but the prize was presented online via Twitter. Bloomsbury has bought the rights to David Byrne and Maira Kalman’s American Utopia. Based on Byrne’s Broadway show of the same name, the book will be published next September. T Kira Madden’s Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls is being adapted into a movie, Deadline reports. “T Kira’s story is a lesson

Barbara Ehrenreich. Photo: Stephen Voss At the New Yorker, author Jia Tolentino (Trick Mirror) talks with Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed) about class inequality in the US, the New York Times’ reporting of the 2008 financial crisis, good versus bad solidarity, the coronavirus, environmental collapse, and the author’s (guarded) hope for the future. James Fallows, a longtime contributor to The Atlantic and the author of Our Towns and China Airborne, has started a list of writers and people in the media who have called on news outlets to “please stop live coverage” of Trump’s “briefings,” which are “49% misinformation

Namwali Serpell. Photo: Peg Skorpinski The recipients of this year’s Windham Campbell Prizes were announced yesterday. Winners include Yiyun Li, Namwali Serpell, and Anne Boyer. Lucie Elven has sold a new book to Soft Skull. The Weak Spot “follows an unnamed narrator’s arrival in a remote European town to apprentice under the enigmatic man who runs the town’s pharmacy, and examines ideas about narrative, language, power, prescriptions, cures, and women’s bodies.” For The Ringer, Jane Hu explains why Ling Ma’s 2018 novel Severance speaks to our current moment. NiemanLab looks at how coronavirus and social distancing is affecting alt-weeklies

Merve Emre. Photo: Christian Nakarado The Personality Brokers author Merve Emre has sold a new book. Doubleday has bought the rights to Woman: The History of an Idea, which details “a history of womanhood as it’s been defined by literature, philosophy, science, and culture across the ages.” Min Jin Lee, Kiley Reid, Victor LaValle and more discuss the books they turn to for comfort. Hilary Leichter, Celia Laskey, Emily Nemens, and other debut authors are exploring new ways to promote their books at a time when book tours and in-person interviews are impossible. Independent bookstore owners talk to the

Sloane Crosley. Photo: Laurel Golio Rick Atkinson’s The British Are Coming has won the New-York Historical Society’s Barbara and David Zalaznick Book Prize. New York’s McNally Jackson bookstores have temporarily laid off almost eighty employees. Staff will be paid through the week and receive health care for the rest of the month. Literary Hub has published its first list of ways to support independent publishers and booksellers. At the Washington Post, Paul Farhi and Sarah Ellison examine Fox News’s changing coverage of the coronavirus pandemic. Sloane Crosley reflects on the impulse to write during emergencies and tragedy. “What happens

Trisha Low. Photo: Kari Orvik “These stories we make, these books we read… What do they amount to in the presence of suffering?” asks Literary Hub editor in chief Johnny Diamond. “The answer has always been the same, in good times and in bad: books are how we bear witness to life, even as they divert us from its darkest days.” The website plans to point readers to ways to support independent bookstores and authors, and is also offering personalized book recommendations. PEN America has cancelled this year’s World Voices Festival due to COVID-19, which was supposed to take

Carlos Lozada. Photo: Bill O’Leary Mark Sarvas, author of the novel Memento Park, is launching the Decameron Reading Series, a website that will feature video and audio recordings of authors reading their work. He’s starting it for “friends whose bookstore events have been canceled,” but if the site is successful, he says he will “gladly do the same for any writers who have canceled tours.” Sarvas adds: “It’s a safe way to help get the word out for these worthy titles, and gives us all something literary and fun to do while we are cooped up at home. If

Sarah M. Broom. Photo: Adam Shemper The National Book Critics Circle Award winners were announced last night. Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments won the prize for criticism, Morgan Parker’s Magical Negro won for poetry, and Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House won the John Leonard Prize. A ceremony that was originally scheduled for tonight at the New School will now be held in September due to COVID-19. The American Academy of Arts and Letters has announced the winners of this year’s prizes. Honorees include Valeria Luiselli, Wayne Koestenbaum, Alex Kotlowitz, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Mary Ruefle, among others.

Cathy Park Hong. Photo: Beowulf Sheehan For Ssense, Thessaly La Force talks to Cathy Park Hong about poetry, Richard Pryor, and her new essay collection, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. Hong said that her “obsession” with Pryor’s comedy was part of the inspiration for her book. “I have never been able to directly and honestly write about race,” she said. “I thought, how can I write honestly about race that feels as immediate and urgent and real as what Richard Pryor was doing with stand-up comedy?” A poet by training, Hong landed on the essay form, which does

Bryan Washington. Photo: David Gracia The finalists for this year’s Lambda Literary Awards were announced yesterday. Nominees include Kristen Arnett’s Mostly Dead Things, Bryan Washington’s Lot, and We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan. The winners will be announced at a ceremony in June. ProPublica reporter and New York Times Magazine staff writer Pamela Colloff has sold a book to Random House. A Deal With the Devil will tell the story of “America’s most prolific jailhouse informant, Paul Skalnik, the people he damaged on a decades-long crime spree, and the people and institutions that enabled

Ann Napolitano. Photo: Jake Chessum The National Magazine Awards ceremony has been postponed due to COVID-19 concerns, the New York Post reports. The event, which was scheduled for March 12, will likely be rescheduled for later this spring. At Literary Hub, Ann Napolitano explains why writers should follow their obsessions. “We are inundated with information every hour of every day, and so it’s entirely possible to go through your life without realizing which subjects, pieces of art, or stories call out to you,” she writes. “If you’re a writer or artist, missing this information will deprive your work. If

Jonathan Escoffery. Photo: Colwill Brown Kerry Howley, author of the cage-fighting classic Thrown, has written a piece about Elizabeth Warren’s takedown of Michael Bloomberg (“perfect brutality”), and about the thrill that she felt while watching Warren debate. “To watch Warren explain something was to watch someone with a particularly ordered mind, capable of seizing upon a narrow question, zooming out and carrying you concisely along a set of interlocking forces,” Howley writes. “Even when you didn’t agree, you could marvel at the fluidity with which she engaged the logic of the worldview. The system may be rigged, but she

Brandon Taylor. Photo: Bill Adams At Literary Hub, Jessi Jezewska Stevens reflects on the passive protagonist. “Passive protagonists can ruin things for any number of reasons. They resist and retard drama. They lack motivation. They’re weak. . . . There’s perhaps a special danger in writing a passive woman, a trope that rests on centuries of male underestimation of the weaker sex,” she writes. “Even still, I feel motivated to make at least half an argument for the passive, lazy lead, who, despite the wisdom of popular craft, I also find uniquely useful for cutting through the bullshit of

Hilary Leichter. Photo: Sylvie Rosokoff At Literary Hub, Kristin Iversen talks to Hilary Leichter about capitalism, the gig economy, and what inspired her to write her new novel, Temporary. “I was teaching in an undergraduate program, and I was tutoring five different people, and I had a temp job during the day. . . . I realized that everyone around me was sort of in this same position and we were all just spending all of our time racing around—for what? We were just trying to stay afloat,” she explained. “I wrote it before the election in 2016, and

Ocean Vuong. Photo: Tom Hines The winners of this year’s PEN America awards were announced earlier this week. Yiyun Li’s Where Reasons End won the Jean Stein Book Award, Mimi Lok won the Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection, and Brandon Shimoda’s The Grave on the Wall was awarded the Open Book Award. The PEN/Faulkner award finalists were announced yesterday. The nominees are Chloe Aridjis’s Sea Monsters, Yiyun Li’s Where Reason Ends, 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 winner will be

Candice Carty-Williams The longlist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction was announced yesterday. Nominees include Angie Cruz’s Dominicana, Jenny Offill’s Weather, Jacqueline Woodson’s Red at the Bone, and Candice Carty-Williams’s Queenie. The winner will be announced in June. Former Esquire fiction editor Tylor Cabot has launched a new website that uses fiction to reflect on real-world events. The Chronicles of Now will publish short fiction by writers like Carmen Maria Machado, Weike Wang, and Colum McCann that will “be an entry point into the social and political issues they examine,” Literary Hub explains. Stephen Rubin is joining Simon Schuster