Anelise Chen’s So Many Olympic Exertions, Isabella Hammad’s The Parisian, Johannes Lichtman’s Such Good Work, Bryan Washington’s Lot, and Ashley Wurzbacher’s Happy Like This have been selected as “5 Under 35” honorees by the National Book Foundation.
Oprah Winfrey has picked Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer for her eponymous book club, which is being revived by Apple Books.
The New York Times’s Alexandra Alter looks at the ways book publishers are taking more responsibility for the accuracy of the books they publish. “Publishers have long maintained that fact-checking every book would be prohibitively expensive, and that the responsibility falls on authors, who hold the copyrights,” she writes. “But in today’s polarized media landscape, that stance appears to be shifting as some publishers privately agree that they should be doing more, particularly when the subject matter is controversial.”
The Guardian talks to Hilary Mantel about her writing career, the “Tudor heritage industry,” and adapting her Thomas Cromwell series for stage and screen. “Each medium offers new opportunities for the story, which is never used up, never completely told,” she explained. “Working on the theatre version was a fresh start in a new field, and maybe helped sharpen up my scene-building skills as a novelist. It persuaded me that however complex your material, you can unfold it with clarity and energy.”
Kathryn Watson reflects on ancient philosophers and the new type of self-help books targeted at Millennials and Generation Z. “Millennials aren’t looking for lifehacks to win friends and influence people; they are looking for workable systems that will sanction and codify their behaviors,” she writes. “Luckily for them, philosophers have been working on doing just that for the past several thousand years.”