Best-selling crime fiction novelist Walter Mosley will be awarded the National Book Foundation’s lifetime achievement award, making him the first Black man to receive the distinction. Mosley’s work has been adapted for film and TV, and has been recognized with the Edgar Award, an O. Henry Prize, and even a Grammy. Said foundation director Lisa Lucas: “His oeuvre and his lived experience are distinctly part of the American experience.”
At Slate, listen to Louise Glück, winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature, read three poems: “A Myth of Innocence,” “Crater Lake,” and “The Open Grave.”
New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet discusses redesigning the paper’s front page during the COVID-19 pandemic. Baquet observes: “Design is part of the answer to every problem facing journalism. With newspapers, we’ve known how to build a print paper that displays our best stuff so that people could very easily find it. It’s not as easy with the phone. And who knows what comes after the phone? Design is going to be more important as technology evolves.”
On the Morgan Library and Museum’s Instagram, Rachel Syme talks with curator Sal Robinson about letter writing.
At the Paris Review’s Daily blog, Rebecca Bengal revisits Wendy Ewald’s Portraits and Dreams: Photographs and Stories by Children of the Appalachians, the photographer’s 1985 project focused on Letcher County in the Appalachian region of Kentucky. The book has just been republished in an expanded new edition by Mack.
Mark your calendars: on Saturday, October 17th, Albertine Books will host a virtual event featuring professor Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir and New Yorker writer Judith Thurman. Le Bon de Beauvoir, the adopted daughter of Simone de Beauvoir, will discuss her mother’s 1954 novel, Les Inséparables, which was finally published this fall.