Paper Trail

New York Public Library announces Young Lions finalists; How reporting has changed during the coronavirus pandemic


Kiley Reid. Photo: David Goddard

The New York Public Library has announced the finalists for the 2020 Young Lions Fiction Award. The nominees are Bryan Washington’s Lot, Xuan Juliana Wang’s Home Remedies, Steph Cha’s Your House Will Pay, Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age, and Julia Phillips’s Disappearing Earth.

Sports writer Jeff Benedict is working on a new book about the New England Patriots. The Dynasty will be published by Avid Reader Press in September.

The Association of American Publishers has released data on book sales during March. While overall sales fell by 8 percent, audiobook sales rose by 15 percent and sales by trade publishers held steady.

In an op-ed for Mediaite, Matt Lauer questions Ronan Farrow’s reporting and claims that the reporter did not fact check many key details in Catch and Kill. Although Lauer originally wrote the piece as a response to the book’s release in late 2019, he said he decided to publish it now after Ben Smith took issue with Farrow’s methods in his New York Times column earlier this week. “All I’ll say on this is that Matt Lauer is just wrong,” Farrow responded.

Tow Center’s Sara Rafsky talks to reporters about how their work has changed during the coronavirus pandemic. “New York’s journalists are learning to report while socially distancing, and, in some cases, are putting their lives at risk to cover what has become the epicenter of the global pandemic,” she writes. “With shrinking access and decreasing numbers, the work of journalists to hold the powerful accountable may become even harder.”

“Pandemic diaries are not merely documents of a particular time but documents of entering into a particular, altered relationship with time,” writes Parul Sehgal on first-person accounts of life during coronavirus. “Everyone is out of sync, jet-lagged in ordinary life, untethered to ordinary time while also being obsessively clock-struck.”