Michelle Obama’s memoir Becoming sold more than 725,000 units on November 13, the day of its release. This is the biggest release-day sales total for any book published in the US in 2018. Maya Jasanoff, the author of The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World, has won the 2018 Cundill History Prize. Ann Powers, the author of Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music, is working on a book about Joni Mitchell, title TBD. The Pulitzer board has announced that fiction writer Junot Diaz will remain one of its members.

Javier Marias For PEN International’s Day of the Imprisoned Writer, Arundhati Roy has written a letter to photographer Shahidul Alam, who was arrested for criticizing the Bangladeshi government. “How is it possible for people to defend themselves against laws like these?” Roy writes of the charges. “It’s like having to prove one’s innocence before a panel of certified paranoiacs. Every argument only serves to magnify their paranoia and heighten their delusions.” Alam was released on bail shortly after the letter was published. “One of the problems with novelists is that we never learn the job,” Javier Marías tells Garth

Jonathan Franzen The 2018 National Book Award winners were announced last night. Sigrid Nunez received the fiction prize for The Friend, Jeffrey C. Stewart won the nonfiction prize for The New Negro, and Justin Phillip Reed won the poetry prize for Indecency. Yoko Tawada and Margaret Mitsutani won the first translated literature award for Tawada’s novel The Emissary. Fox News is joining several other news organizations in filing amicus briefs in support of CNN’s lawsuit against the White House. ”Secret Service passes for working White House journalists should never be weaponized,” said Fox News president Jay Wallace in a

Wesley Yang. Photo: Rich Woodson CNN filed a lawsuit against the White House yesterday after Jim Acosta’s press pass was revoked last week. The Columbia Journalism Review rounds up opinions on the case from Knight First Amendment Institute director Jameel Jaffer, the New Yorker’s Masha Gessen, and CJR writer Jonathan Peters. “When a political leader puts journalists in a position of choosing between loyalty and access, he always wins, and journalists always lose,” Gessen said at a recent Columbia Journalism School event. “We can talk about how to minimize the loss, but it is certainly a net loss.” At

Lauren Groff The New York Times’s Jim Rutenberg asks various political operatives how the press should respond to Trump revoking Jim Acosta’s press pass. “It isn’t my habit to ask political operatives to weigh in on journalistic matters,” Rutenberg writes. “But in bringing a reporter’s notebook to a knife fight, the White House press corps has seemed overmatched in parrying attacks from a man who flummoxed rivals with catchy sobriquets like Low Energy Jeb, Lyin’ Ted and Crooked Hillary.” New York magazine is instituting a paywall at the end of November. The new system will not affect nonprofit local

Publishers Weekly has released its latest annual publishing survey, which looks at racial diversity pay compensation by gender, and salary increases. The survey also asks employees if they have been sexually harassed in the workplace, and looks at how many companies have sexual-harassment policies.

Nicolas Mathieu The 2018 Goncourt Prize has been awarded to Nicolas Mathieu for his novel Leurs Enfants Aprè Eux. The book, “a portrait of teenagers growing up in a forgotten, hopeless region of France in the 1990s,” will be published in the US by Other Press late next year. “It is quite a vertigo moment. . . . Writing is a lonely activity, and suddenly I am in the middle of the spotlight,” Mathieu told the New York Times in an interview. “It’s quite disturbing, but it’s good for the book.” Later this month, Vintage Books will republish Fletcher

Nicole Chung. Photo: Erica B. Tappis New York Times book critic and obituary writer Christopher Lehmann-Haupt has died at the age of eighty-four. Lehmann-Haupt worked at the paper for over thirty years, during which he wrote 4,000 essays and reviews. “Readers and colleagues called him a judicious, authoritative voice on fiction and a seemingly boundless array of history, biography, current events and other topics, with forays into Persian archaeology and fly fishing,” writes Robert D. McFadden. New York Review of Books contributors have signed an open letter condemning the Trump administration’s continued detention of migrant children who have been

Ottessa Moshfegh Haruki Murakami is donating his manuscripts and other items to his alma mater, Waseda University. According to Japan Times, the donation includes translated versions of his work and his record collection. “I don’t have any children, and it would cause trouble for me if those materials became scattered or lost,” Murakami explained in a press conference. Alice Quinn is resigning from her position as executive director of the Poetry Society of America. Time magazine editor in chief Edward Felsenthal has been chosen as the company’s CEO by new owners Marc and Lynne Benioff. Felsenthal will continue to

Jelani Cobb Leslie Jamison lists her favorite books about drinking. “They aren’t chronicles of the way many people can drink,” she explains, “but stories that have made me feel less alone in the way I used to drink: desperately, repetitively, often gracelessly, delivered constantly back into the dingy storeroom of the self.” Don DeLillo talks to The Guardian about his next book, the national news cycle, and the difference between writing novels and plays. “If you stay home, count yourself among the hundreds of thousands now being disenfranchised by the relentless parade of restrictions that Republicans everywhere are imposing

Kapka Kassabova. Photo: Marti Friedlander Kapka Kassabova has won the British Academy’s Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding, which honors “an outstanding contribution to global cultural understanding that illuminates the interconnections and divisions that shape cultural identity worldwide.” Kassabova is the author of Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe, a hard-to-classify meditation on territory surrounding the intersections of Greece, Turkey, and Bulgaria. In the book, Kassabova roams “this ‘back door to Europe’ in an effort to find out, up close, what borders do to people, and vice versa. Her book is a deconstruction of the looming,

Moira Donegan The Guardian has added four new columnists to its US opinion section. Moira Donegan, Bhaskar Sunkara, Rebecca Solnit, and David Sirota will all contribute writing on different angles of American politics. The group brings “a range of perspectives that will help Guardian readers make sense of the political and social turmoil taking place in America today,” Guardian US editor John Mulholland said in a statement. The Marshall Project editor in chief Bill Keller is retiring. Keller will join the board of directors once a replacement editor has been chosen. Fast author Jorie Graham has won this year’s

Jhumpa Lahiri Lithub talks to National Book Award finalists in translated literature Jhumpa Lahiri, Domenico Starnone, Olga Tokarczuk, and Jennifer Croft. Lahiri says that she doesn’t suffer from writer’s block. “At times I’m ‘blocked’ by the obligations and complications in life that keep me from writing or translating. But without those complications, many of them quite joyful, there would be little to write about.” Croft, on the other hand, says that translation helps her get over writer’s block. “It’s a wonderful way to continue to write and learn new strategies, things, styles while allowing ideas for future original writing

Martha Nussbaum Monarchy of Fear author Martha Nussbaum has won the 2018 Berggruen Prize, which awards $1 million to a person who has “profoundly shaped human self-understanding and advancement in a rapidly changing world.” Nussbaum will receive the award at a ceremony in December.  Penguin Random House imprint Dutton is releasing “mini books” of John Green’s novels, with hopes to capture the attention of young readers who might not be interested in traditional paperbacks. “The tiny editions are the size of a cellphone and no thicker than your thumb, with paper as thin as onion skin,” Alexandra Alter explains

Lindsey Hilsum The Guardian talks to Lindsey Hilsum about war reporting, diaries, and In Extremis, her new biography of foreign correspondent Marie Colvin. “I think Marie’s killing . . . marked a watershed when it became unacceptably dangerous for many editors to send reporters into those situations,” Hilsum said of Colvin’s death in 2012. “It seems to me that with this nexus of corrupt governments and organised crime that investigative journalists are under more threat now than at any time in my career.” Simon Schuster editors Jofie Ferrari-Adler and Ben Loehnen are forming a new imprint at the company.

George Saunders George Saunders has sold his new book to Random House. In Masterclass, the Lincoln in the Bardo author reflects on two decades of teaching Russian authors to MFA students. According to his publisher, the book is like a “seminar in book form” that asks: “how do great stories work, how do you write them, and what are their political and moral implications?” Ntozake Shange, the playwright and poet who wrote the award-winning for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, has died. “I have the theological understanding of a third grader,” Anne

Tony Hoagland. Photo: Dorothy Alexander. The poet Tony Hoagland died Tuesday from cancer at the age of sixty-four. Hoagland was the author of many poetry collections, including 2003’s What Narcissism Means to Me, a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. He received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and won the Poetry Foundation’s Mark Twain Award, among other honors. Critic Dwight Garner said of the poet, “At his frequent best . . . Hoagland is demonically in touch with the American demotic.” The Poetry Foundation has twelve of Hoagland’s poems online, including “Bible Study,” which

Brett Easton Ellis Bret Easton Ellis is publishing his first nonfiction book, White, in May 2019. Ellis told the TLS that the work is “a lament from a disillusioned Gen X-er,” and that he’s turned away from fiction because, “No one really talks about novels anymore.” President Trump is inspiring a new wave of books about impeachment. Elizabeth Holtzman, who served on the House Judiciary Committee and worked on the Nixon impeachment in 1974, is publishing The Case for Impeaching Trump this November.  The PBS show The Great American Read has named To Kill A Mockingbird as the country’s

Colm Toibin The New York Times’s publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, told a CNN conference in New York that the mission of the paper hasn’t changed in the Trump era: “We seek the truth, we hold power to account and we help people to understand the world. And we’re just doing that with a different story right now.” As Erik Wemple points out, that’s not good enough for many readers, who, as a recent article by Jay Rosen in PressThink notes, have more power over the publication than ever before, and are using that pressure to urge the Times to forcefully call

Moira Donegan Moira Donegan is writing a book. The still-untitled book was bought by Scribner and will be a “primer on sexual harassment and assault as a lived experience” and explore the “moral and political challenge” that it presents for feminists. The Cut talks to Robbie Kaplan, the lawyer defending Donegan in the lawsuit brought against her by Stephen Elliott. The New York Times’s Parul Sehgal explores the prevalence of ghost stories in modern literature, which she writes is “positively ectoplasmic these days, crawling with hauntings, haints and wraiths of every stripe and disposition.” Danielle Dutton and Martin Riker