The longlist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction was announced yesterday. Nominees include Angie Cruz’s Dominicana, Jenny Offill’s Weather, Jacqueline Woodson’s Red at the Bone, and Candice Carty-Williams’s Queenie. The winner will be announced in June.
Former Esquire fiction editor Tylor Cabot has launched a new website that uses fiction to reflect on real-world events. The Chronicles of Now will publish short fiction by writers like Carmen Maria Machado, Weike Wang, and Colum McCann that will “be an entry point into the social and political issues they examine,” Literary Hub explains.
Stephen Rubin is joining Simon & Schuster as a consulting publisher.
At the New York Times, Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Natalie Kitroeff look at Michael Bloomberg’s “heavy use” of nondisclosure and nondisparagement agreements and talk to employees who are still bound by them. “If they were free to talk, some of the former employees said, they would describe a company that, while it provides generous pay and benefits, can be an uncomfortable place to work, especially for women,” they write.
“I spent my whole career competing against The Times, so coming to work here feels a bit like giving in,” writes former BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith in his first media column for the paper. “And I worry that the success of The Times is crowding out the competition.”
New York Times book critic Parul Sehgal tells The Cut “how she gets it done.” Sehgal says she goes to bed around 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning every day and occasionally walks two hours from her home in Brooklyn to her office at the paper. “To do this work, you have to be kind of monkish. Book reviewing involves a time commitment that reviewing film and music just doesn’t impose on a critic,” she said. “I love gossip, but even if the backstory is fantastic, or there’s some very juicy impolitic statements that the writer has uttered, the work is always so much richer. It helps that most of my friends aren’t writers. If someone is glaring at me at a party, it’s not usually because of a review.”