The longlist for the 2019 Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize has been announced. Nominees include Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift, Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Lauren Wilkinson’s American Spy, and Elvia Wilk’s Oval. The shortlist will be announced in September.
The photo archives of Ebony and Jet magazines have been sold for $30 million to “a consortium of foundations led by the J. Paul Getty Trust,” the Chicago Tribune reports. The group plans to give the photos to a number of cultural institutions “to ensure public access and use by scholars, researchers and journalists.”
US soccer star Megan Rapinoe is writing a memoir. Penguin Press will publish the book in fall 2020.
Javier Marías talks to the New York Times’s By the Book section about Don Quixote, ghost stories, and his new novel, Berta Isla.
“At a moment of particular gravity for the country, with the sitting president credibly accused of obstructing justice, and many of his campaign staff and associates under investigation and indictment, may I suggest that if you, a journalist, are bored with the politics of this—if you are demanding somehow to be entertained, right now—you’re not doing your job,” writes Maria Bustillos, Columbia Journalism Review’s unofficial MSNBC public editor, of the network’s coverage to Robert Mueller’s testimony.