Jim Harrison Jim Harrison—the author of twenty-one works of fiction, as well as screenplays and books of poetry—died on Saturday at age seventy-eight. He was perhaps best known as the author of Legends of the Fall (1979), which was adapted into a movie, and for his notorious appetites. The Times obituary takes note of his penchant for guns (shooting rattlesnakes in his yard), company (he hung out with Jack Nicholson, John Huston, Bill Murray, et. al), alcohol, and food (he once ate 144 oysters in a single sitting). Sources say that Gawker paid the Conde Nast executive who was outed on the

Ida B. Wells After all the upheaval of abandoning nudity, it looks as if Playboy may be going up for sale soon. Fortune has published a very affectionate profile of Jeff Bezos, who nowadays has, it asserts, “every reason to cha-cha.” It does also note that “the possibilities of a less tethered Jeff Bezos are equal parts exciting (imagine what he’ll do) and terrifying (pity whom he’ll crush).” The one really endearing detail the piece includes, however, is an account of one of Bezos’s less successful innovations, “disemvoweling,” a feature he attempted to introduce to the Washington Post which

Kate Millett The winners of this year’s Whiting Awards for emerging writers were announced this week: You can read extracts from their work at The Paris Review’s website, or you can hear them read in person tonight, at BookCourt. (The Whiting Foundation is also offering a substantial new grant to help writers of creative nonfiction complete their books—applications are open now.) Maggie Doherty’s New Republic piece on Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (reissued this month by Columbia University Press) begins with the author vomiting all over a Persian rug she’d just bought in a fit of “libertine glory” after selling

Chris Kraus Roxane Gay’s novel, An Untamed State, about a woman who is abducted in Haiti, is to be adapted for the screen by Fox Searchlight, and Gay has signed on to co-write the script. After nearly ten years of offering his New York Times colleagues regular critiques of their writing and editing, Philip B. Corbett announces in his latest After Deadline post that there will be no more “for the time being.” So if we want to take note of the Times’s use of “sprung” for “sprang,” or its description of Donald Trump “grabbing his podium with both

Ernest Hemingway Efforts to make the writing life look more action-packed than it really is are not new, but that shouldn’t prevent anyone from enjoying the trailer for Papa: Hemingway in Cuba, which, incidentally, is being billed as the first American film to be shot in Cuba since the revolution. Gawker, after being ordered last week to pay Hulk Hogan $115 million—considerably more than the media company is worth—asked for mercy and got hit with an extra $25 million in punitive damages instead. Jim Rutenberg, the New York Times’s new media columnist, stepping into the formidable shoes of the

Prince On Friday night in New York’s meatpacking district, Prince announced that he is writing a memoir. “The good people of Random House have made me an offer I can’t refuse!” said the musician. The book, titled The Beautiful Ones, will be published by Random House imprint Spiegel  Grau in fall 2017. Dan Piepenbring, the web editor of the Paris Review, will cowrite. “He’s a good critic,” Prince said. “That’s what I need. Not a yes man.” The winners of the National Book Critics Circle Awards, which were announced on Thursday last week, have listed some of their biggest

Maggie Nelson The winners of the National Book Critics Circle Awards, announced last night, include Paul Beatty (for fiction), Maggie Nelson (for criticism), Ross Gay (for poetry), and Margo Jefferson (for autobiography). At The Baffler, Chris Lehmann paints a vivid picture of the Breitbart media operation and its workings. William Brennan has a piece on Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Irish Gaelic masterpiece, Cré na Cille, written in the 1940s and only now available in English translation (two translations, in fact, with two different titles: The Dirty Dust and Graveyard Clay). Ó Cadhain’s novel, his debut, was initially rejected by a

Zadie Smith The writer-director Michael Mann is launching a publishing imprint, Michael Mann Books, in order to work with a stable of authors (who’ll sometimes share the cover credit with him) on fiction and nonfiction books that he’ll also develop for film and television. The New Yorker is previewing its new podcast, The Author’s Voice, in which, as of next week, you’ll be able to hear writers reading their own stories from the magazine. They’re pulling out all the stops for this first sample episode, which boasts Zadie Smith doing an American accent (or several) as she reads “Escape

Anita Brookner After last night’s results, John Cassidy considers the prospect of a fight for the presidency between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Novelist and art historian Anita Brookner, who won the Booker Prize in 1984 for Hotel du Lac, has died. The novelist Hilary Mantel has written that “Brookner is the sort of artist described as minor by people who read her books only once,” whereas, in Mantel’s view, the “singular quality of each, as well as the integrity of the project, is established.” Brookner told The Paris Review, of her autobiographical first novel, A Start in Life,

Meghan Daum A somewhat chilling article in the New York Times describes a firm called Jellybooks and its founder, who hopes to use data to transform book publishing, Moneyball-style. The company is working with publishers to examine in detail how people actually read their ebooks: “On average, fewer than half of the books tested were finished by a majority of readers. Most readers typically give up on a book in the early chapters. Women tend to quit after 50 to 100 pages, men after 30 to 50. Only 5 percent of the books Jellybooks tested were completed by more

John Edgar Wideman In an article published in Milan’s Corriere della Sera, the Italian writer and professor Marco Santagata claims that he has determined the true identity of Elena Ferrante. He writes that Ferrante is the pen name of Marcella Marmo, a professor at a Neapolitan university. According to Slate, Marmo has denied Santagata’s claim, and has pointed out that she is too “timid and reserved” to be such an bold writer. Ferrante’s Italian publisher has also denied that Marmo is Ferrante. Harper Lee’s estate will no longer allow the printing of inexpensive, mass-market editions of To Kill a Mockingbird.

Marilynne Robinson The novelist Marilynne Robinson has her say on that “great orange-haired Unintended Consequence,” the nonfictional Donald Trump: He is “alarming as well as absurd, stirring and stoking the worst impulses in the electorate. But then this is only a darkening of the atmosphere we have lived in since Nixon, as fear and resentment began to be commodified very profitably by the likes of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.” As the thaw between the US and Cuba continues, Publishers Weekly has called for an end to the embargo on books: “the Cuban people have not been able to

Joyce Carol Oates Insights yielded in the ongoing trial over Gawker’s publication of a Hulk Hogan sex tape this week include the following: jokes between colleagues don’t hold up that well when explained on the stand several years later; Gawker isn’t too concerned with anyone’s privacy; the rest of America isn’t too concerned with Gawker and its ilk (“And what is The Hair Spin?” One lawyer inquired).  Elena Ferrante, Orhan Pamuk, Kenzaburō Ōe, and Eka Kurniawan are on the longlist for the Man Booker International Prize, whose previous winners include Philip Roth, Lydia Davis, and László Krasznahorkai. Nicolas Cage

Maggie Nelson FiveThirtyEight analyzes Bernie Sanders’s surprise win in the Michigan primary, and what it may mean for the Democratic race: “If Michigan was just a fluke (which is possible), then tonight will be forgotten soon enough,” Harry Enten writes. “If, however, pollsters are missing something more fundamental about the electorate, then the Ohio and Illinois primaries could be a lot closer than expected. Either way, this result will send a shock wave through the press. Heck, I’m a member of the press, and you might be able to tell how surprised I am.” Meanwhile, Time notes that Ben

Michael Bloomberg The opening round of the Tournament of Books begins tomorrow. Thanks to a Supreme Court ruling that refused its appeal, Apple will now be forced to pay out $400 million to ebook buyers who were affected by its illegal price-fixing. There is a funeral mass today for Pat Conroy, bestselling author of The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini, who died on Friday. Michael Bloomberg, in a Bloomberg column, has ruled out a run for President, for fear of aiding the candidacy of Ted Cruz or Donald Trump: “I have known Mr. Trump casually for many

Roxane Gay Bill McKibben, the author of Earth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet and the founder of the environmentalist organization 350.org, laments the lack of attention paid to last week’s news about global warming: “Thursday, while the nation debated the relative size of Republican genitalia, something truly awful happened. Across the northern hemisphere, the temperature, if only for a few hours, apparently crossed a line: it was more than two degrees Celsius above ‘normal’ for the first time in recorded history and likely for the first time in the course of human civilization.” Last week, Roxane

Edmund White Poet and professor Matthew Zapruder is taking over as poetry column editor for the New York Times magazine as of this week. He takes pleasure in the idea that a poem placed in the magazine can “follow up on, refract, amplify, reconfigure, the language of culture and news. . . . The poem gets a chance to exist in a place that is not isolated or rarified. It gets to be a part of life, and we get to read it that way, too.” Adam Johnson has won this year’s Story Prize for Fortune Smiles, the collection

Bob Dylan Longlists have been announced for the Orwell Prize for Journalism, and for the much more enticingly named Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils. has refused a parting deal with the network that would have prevented her talking about the problems there via a “non-disparagement clause.” “They wanted us to cover politics in the narrowest sense,” CNN Money quotes her as saying. “I told my team, we can’t allow our own show to go off air and then provide racial cover by having me continue to host the show so people see the little black girl up

Young Jean Lee The New Yorker’s long-serving managing editor, Silvia Killingsworth, will be taking over as editor of |http://nymag.com/following/2016/02/matt-buchanan-is-leaving-the-awl.html#|the Awl|, and while she’s at it, will be in charge of a relaunch of the Hairpin. Nine writers, including Helen Garner, C. E. Morgan, and Hilton Als, received one of Yale’s Windham-Campbell Prizes this week: Always good, as the program director Michael Kelleher points out, to get a call “out of the blue” offering you $150,000. Among the winners is Branden Jacob-Jenkins—who said ”I only wish everyone alive could get a phone call like the one I just received”—who has

Melissa Harris-Perry Buzzfeed reports that the New York Times has off-the-record tape of Donald Trump, who hopes to consolidate his lead in the race for the GOP nomination today, suggesting that his views on immigration may be less rigid than those he has expressed in public. Rivals Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio are asking that the recording be released. And election season seems the worst time for cable news to be losing Melissa Harris-Perry, whose MSNBC show has mysteriously collapsed, or in her words, been “effectively and utterly silenced.” If you haven’t yet read Joshua Cohen’s piece on Bernie Sanders, Super Tuesday may