Marlon James reluctant to rely on its say-so alone.” But this doesn’t seem like a paradox so much as a difference in approach and standards. Being more than “quite reliable” takes a little more time (and often a verified source). Authors Rob Sheffield (Love Is a Mix Tape), Michaelangelo Matos (The Underground Is Massive), and Carl Wilson (Let’s Talk about Love) celebrate the genius of Prince.

Prince At the Washington Post, Alyssa Rosenberg mourns the loss of Prince, who died yesterday aged fifty-seven, and cites his 2007 appearance at the Super Bowl, “this particular worship service dedicated to traditional masculinity,” as an argument for “a vastly huger range of possible ways for a man to command the nation.” Rosenberg also reminds us of Hilton Als’s great “paean 2 Prince,” from a 2012 issue of Harper’s. It’s not yet clear how far the star had gotten with his memoir, which he’d recently announced he was writing with the help of the Paris Review’s Dan Piepenbring (“a

Bret Easton Ellis The winners of this year’s Lambda Literary Awards, which honor excellence in LGBT literature, include Eileen Myles and Hilton Als. At the June 6th ceremony, winners in twenty-five categories will be announced by a stellar cast of writers, performers, and activists including actor Cherry Jones (who played a Myles-like character on Transparent), editor Tavi Gevinson, comedienne Kate Clinton, and many other stars.  The New York Timesaccompanied Bret Easton Ellis on a night out to see the Broadway musical version of his novel American Psycho. After some initial trepidation, Ellis appeared to enjoy the show, as the paper

Kevin Bacon A few readers of Chris Kraus’s groundbreaking epistolary novel I Love Dick have expressed concern that publishing it was unfair to cultural critic Dick Hebdige, her sometime crush and the book’s unwilling subject. It should come as some comfort to those people (and, who knows, perhaps even to Hebdige himself) that the delightful Kevin Bacon is likely to play Dick in Jill Soloway’s upcoming TV version. Bill Cosby’s lawyers are pressing New York magazine to release all unpublished material from the interviews for its cover story on his many accusers. In the latest issue of Harper’s, Elaine

Kathryn Schulz This year’s Pulitzer Prize winners were announced yesterday, including Kathryn Schulz, who’s being rewarded one more time for scaring us more than any magazine writer should. Hilary Mantel describes her days writing fiction, which “makes me the servant of a process that has no clear beginning and end or method of measuring achievement. . . . A book grows according to a subtle and deep-laid plan. At the end, I see what the plan was.” Lenny, Lena Dunham’s new Random House imprint, is publishing Sour Heart, the first story collection by poet and essayist Jenny Zhang. (“The

Mary Beard Jonathan Franzen is editing the next edition of The Best American Essays. The contents haven’t been revealed yet, but rumor has it that Alexander Chee’s “Girl” is one of the selections. The New York Times style section features a profile of the classics scholar Mary Beard, the author of SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (a finalist for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award) and Laughter in Ancient Rome. Laughter, it turns out, plays a significant role in the piece. A. A. Gill once said that Beard, who appears regularly on TV in the UK, was more fit for

Yan Lianke The New Republic’s editor in chief Gabriel Snyder is leaving the magazine after seventeen months in charge. His departure comes on the heels of the recent sale of the publication to Win McCormack. “We published some damn fine work, sometimes under difficult circumstances,” Snyder said in a memo, with admirable understatement. The shortlist is out for this year’s Man Booker International Prize, and contenders include Orhan Pamuk, Yan Lianke, and the elusive Elena Ferrante. The New York Times is investing $50 million in a new team called NYT Global, which hopes to dramatically expand the publication’s international

Nesrine Malik The Guardian has surveyed the seventy million comments left on their website since 2006, looking for patterns in abusive commenting and trolling. They found that the ten most abused writers were eight women and two black men (despite the fact most of the site’s writers are white men). The article includes videos of the journalists (including Jessica Valenti, Nesrine Malik, and Steven Thrasher) discussing the effect of the abuse, as well as interactive data breaking down the survey, and a feature where readers can play moderator, deciding if various comments about feminists should be blocked. Despite all

Marlon James The Beach Boys’ resident genius Brian Wilson will be publishing a memoir in October. I Am Brian Wilson, co-written with Ben Greenman, covers the songwriter’s life and career and will be released shortly after Wilson’s masterwork, the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, celebrates its fiftieth anniversary. In an excerpt from the book on Pitchfork, Wilson writes, “when I think back across my own life, there are so many things that are painful. Sometimes I don’t like discussing them. Sometimes I don’t even like remembering them. But as I get older, the shape of that pain has changed.” The

Maggie Nelson This week’s New Yorker includes Hilton Als’s moving profile of Maggie Nelson. Als proposes one answer to the question of why Nelson’s latest book, The Argonauts, about her experiences in queer family-making with her fluidly-gendered partner Harry Dodge, has resonated so widely: “What . . . fans responded to most viscerally, perhaps, was the fact that it’s a book about becoming, both mentally and physically—about what it takes to shape a self, in all its completeness and disarray.” Nelson’s 2007 memoir The Red Parts, about the trial of a man accused in the unsolved 1969 murder of her

Jelani Cobb Last week, Gay Talese faced much criticism after saying at a Boston conference that he had not been influenced by any women writers of his generation. At Slate, Isaac Chotiner points out that Talese’s recent article in the New Yorker, about a hotel owner in Colorado who spied on his guests, reveals “an even darker side” of the author. The article is, Chotiner states, “a failure of journalistic ethics and a revealing window into Talese’s character,” not least because Talese, in writing the piece, joined the hotel owner and spied on people himself. Meanwhile, Washington Post editor Marisa Bellack has

Philip Roth In a rare move for him, the New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet has harshly criticized a story the paper ran on Wednesday, which detailed Gay Talese’s online trials after he made some unfortunate remarks about women journalists at a conference. Baquet takes issue with a Talese quote in the article in which he used the word “duplicitous” to describe Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Times journalist to whom Talese had reportedly made another insensitive comment. Baquet writes, “Yesterday’s story was flawed and Nikole was treated unfairly. But this incident is larger than the exchange between her and Gay Talese. Too often, we are

Susan Howe Marcia Clark, the lead prosecutor in the OJ Simpson murder trial, is back in the spotlight, as the FX television series rehashes the case, including the withering comments Clark endured about her appearance. Now a crime novelist, Clark says she always envied the way authors work, “because they can be very successful, but no one knows what they look like. You don’t get recognized. It’s a pretty cool way to work.” Tonight at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, Ben Lerner talks with Susan Howe. On April 18th, the Martha Graham Dance Company will stage a live

Chris Bachelder Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner are starting an imprint at Random House called Lenny, which will publish both fiction and nonfiction. “Jackie,” the anonymous subject of the retracted University of Virginia rape story in Rolling Stone, is being compelled to testify in a defamation suit against the magazine. Gay Talese has written to the Boston Globe to clarify a comment he made at a Boston University writers conference this Saturday, when he said, “I didn’t know any women writers that I loved.” His attempt at damage control does not seem particularly effective: “My answer was ‘no.’ And

James Hannaham James Hannaham has won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for his daring second novel, Delicious Foods, a book that, he told the Washington Post, seemed like “such a misfit, but it’s turning out to be a lot more popular than the kid I thought it was.” Hannaham took the opportunity to plead for more literary fiction that’s about something other than “small things that happen to literary people”: “If you look at composers or poets, experimentation is the most fun they can have. What’s wrong with the literary world that there isn’t more respect for and enjoyment

Kevin Young Twenty years after the arrest of the Unabomber, novelist William T. Vollmann recalls just how baffled the FBI was in its search for the Ted Kaczynski, the man who mailed a number of bombs in an attempt to advance his antigovernment and antitechnology worldview. Vollmann should know a thing or two about the FBI’s fumbling for answers: the novelist himself was for a time considered a suspect. Kevin Young, whose Blue Laws: Selected and Uncollected Poems was just released, discusses his writing process (he works from 10am until 4pm, “once Judge Judy comes on”) and gives a

Padma Lakshmi Imre Kertész, the Nobel-winning novelist and survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, has died. His 2013 Paris Review interview might be as fitting an obituary as any: “I am somebody who survived all of it, somebody who saw the Gorgon’s head and still retained enough strength to finish a work that reaches out to people in a language that is humane.” As AWP begins, the novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen expresses mixed feelings about the need, every now and then, for writers to crawl out of their caves and join the rest of the tribe. Padma Lakshmi, whose new

Paul Beatty Today is the final, championship round of the Morning News Tournament of Books. Novelist Celeste Ng let Paul Beatty’s The Sellout through yesterday over its competitor, President Obama’s favorite, Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff: “Both books have the same effect of shaking the ground under the reader’s feet,” Ng noted. “The Sellout does it through satire: When everyone’s a target, no one has the moral high ground. Fates and Furies uses plot twists.” So Beatty’s book will now be duking it out against Angela Flournoy’s The Turner House. This week, VIDA released the results of its annual

Rivka Galchen The novelist Marilynne Robinson has received a lifetime achievement award from the Library of Congress. The prize, which honors writers who express “something new about the American experience,” has previously been given to Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, and Philip Roth. Stephen Glass, the former journalist caught fabricating multiple stories in the 1990s, now claims to have repaid with interest the publications he wrote for, including the New Republic, Harper’s, and Rolling Stone, to the tune of $200,000. Things to look forward to in the near future include Rivka Galchen’s piece on Hillary Clinton (presumably the last in

Jill Abramson The Guardian has hired former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson (who’s postponed her plans to run a subscription-based longform journalism project producing “one perfect whale of a story” per month) as a biweekly columnist on the presidential race. She’s started with a piece in defense of Hillary Clinton’s probity, even though, she notes, “As a reporter my stories stretch back to Whitewater. I’m not a favorite in Hillaryland.” Jezebel deputy editor Jia Tolentino has a piece about Thomas Sayers Ellis, a visiting professor at the Iowa Writers Workshop who was removed from his post after