Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka is the winner of the 2022 Booker Prize for fiction. You can watch the announcement on the Booker Prize YouTube channel.
LitHub has three short essays by poet Ross Gay. His new book of essays, Inciting Joy, will be published later this month. Gay contributed an essay to Bookforum’s summer issue on basketball, and took part in our video panel on sports and literature.
For Slate, Imogen West-Knights reports from a Gone Girl–themed cruise: “While I was on the boat, people at home texted me with concern, as though I was doing jury duty on some kind of harrowing murder. ‘Why would Gillian Flynn want to do this cruise?’ one asked. Which is the wrong question.”
The media site Semafor launched today. The global news company is starting with $25 million dollars in funding and is the brainchild of media columnist Ben Smith and former Bloomberg executive Justin Smith. Its first big story is “Inside the identity crisis at The New York Times,” in which Ben Smith details the cultural struggles and labor negotiations inside the paper and which features an interview with James Bennet, the op-ed editor who was fired after an opinion piece by Tom Cotton drew outrage.
In a preview from The Drift’s new issue, Tarpley Hitt writes about Hunter Biden: “The Hunter saga can be better understood as the right’s answer to Russiagate: a protracted legal saga with too many dates and niche characters for the public to remember, whose complex nexus of obscure allegations fuels both its critics’ detractions and its champions’ hysteria.”