Olga Tokarczuk. Photo: © Lukasz Giza. The International Booker Prize shortlist has been announced. The six nominees include Olga Tokarczuk and translator Jennifer Croft, who won the award in 2018 for Flights. The winner will be announced on May 26. For Vulture, Jasmine Sanders profiles Margo Jefferson, the author of the new memoir Constructing a Nervous System. Sanders writes, “As a reader, I find Jefferson most enrapturing when . . . she bins her gentility for something sharper. Tending her envy, tallying slights both personal and historical, indulging her gloomier moods: the well-comported girl no more.” New York Times

Rabih Alameddine. Photo: Benito Ordonez The PEN World Voices Festival will hold an emergency summit in May in response to the war in Ukraine. More than one hundred writers will gather, and the Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov will deliver a speech “that will address threats to democracy and free expression.”  Rabih Alameddine has won this year’s PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for his novel The Wrong End of the Telescope, which follows a transgender doctor working in Lesbos at a camp for Syrian refugees. “In a year of stunning and important fiction,” judges Eugenia Kim, Rebecca Makkai, and Rion Amilcar

Chloé Cooper Jones. Photo: Andrew-Grossardt Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal has announced that Elon Musk is joining the board of the social-media giant. Musk began his tenure with a Twitter poll asking if users want an “edit” function, which garnered an overwhelming response.  Chloé Cooper Jones talks about her new memoir, Easy Beauty: “There is this idea from the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch that I use very explicitly in my narrative but then also implicitly, in the structure and craft of the book. Put simply: Iris Murdoch argued that we can only perceive things based on the way that

Roxane Gay. Photo: Jay Grabiec Roxane Gay has announced the first three books that will be published by her new Grove Atlantic imprint: And Then He Sang a Lullaby, the debut novel from twenty-three-year-old Nigerian writer and activist Ani Kayode Somtochukwu; J. V. Lyon’s novel Lush Lives; and Hot Springs Drive, a novel from Lindsay Hunter, the author of Ugly Girls and Eat Only When You’re Hungry. Larua Miller writes about Mick Herron’s “hilarious, unique” spy novels, which are the inspiration for the new TV series Slow Horses, starring Gary Oldman, Kristin Scott Thomas, and Jonathan Pryce. “If James

Richard Howard. Photo: New York Institute for the Humanities Richard Howard, former poet laureate of New York, essayist, and translator of Roland Barthes, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Charles Baudelaire, Simone de Beauvoir, and many other French writers, died on Thursday at the age of ninety-two. His 1969 collection, Untitled Subjects, which presents dramatic monologues given by fifteen Victorians and Edwardians, won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. As the editor of George Braziller’s publishing house’s poetry series, he championed younger poets including Charles Simic and Frank Bidart; he was also poetry editor of the Paris Review in the 1990s and early

Anuk Arudpragasam. Photo: Halik Azeez The Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize shortlist has been announced. The nominees include Anuk Arudpragasam, Brandon Taylor, Patricia Lockwood, and more. You can hear Arudpragasam discuss the nominated book, A Passage North, with Megha Majumdar as part of Bookforum’s “No Wrong Answers” video series.    The New York Review of Books has just published its spring books issue, with Merve Emre on Elizabeth Hardwick, Nicole Rudick on Sarah Manguso, Jackson Lears on Samuel Moyn, and more.  In the New York Times, Alex Vadukul profiles Matthew Gasda, the playwright behind the underground hit Dimes Square, and

Margo Jefferson. Photo: © Claire Holt Yale has announced the eight winners of its international Windham-Campbell Prizes, each of whom will receive $165,000 to support their writing. The awardees in fiction are Tsitsi Dangarembga and Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu, in nonfiction Margo Jefferson and Emmanuel Iduma, in drama Winsome Pinnock and Sharon Bridgforth, and in poetry Wong May and Zaffar Kunial.  Oregon Public Broadcasing’s Jenn Chávez profiles Street Books, a mobile library run by a small team in Portland to provide books to people experiencing homelessness. Ben Hodgson, one of the library’s first regular patrons, has now co-authored a book,

Hanif Abdurraqib. Photo: Megan Leigh Barnard Hanif Abdurraqib talks with The Fader about the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s spring concert series, which he curated this year. The programming focuses on the oral tradition, “and I don’t just mean singing words out loud,” Abdurraqib said. “I mean folks who are using both sound and language to tell cohesive stories, be that in a very tactile sense, like Nikki Giovanni, or by stitching together narratives through a body of music, like Little Simz.” For the New Yorker, Jennifer Wilson profiles Duke University Press editor Ken Wissoker. Wilson writes, “Wissoker heads one

Claudia Rankine. Photo: John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Citizen author Claudia Rankine’s play Help, which is “​​derived from Rankine’s deep inquiry and ongoing investigation into white dominance,” is in previews at The Shed in New York.  Viking has announced that it will publish a collection of letters by John le Carré, titled A Private Spy, on November 8. According to a report by the Associated Press, the book will include correspondence with “Ralph Fiennes, Hugh Laurie and Alec Guinness, the actor famed for playing le Carré’s fictional spy, George Smiley, in adaptations of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Lynne Tillman. Photo: Craig Mod For The Point, Vikrant Dadawala writes about Abdulrazak Gurnah, the 2021 Nobel Laureate in Literature, how the Anglo-American press reacted to his win, and why his work should be read. European colonialism in eastern Africa is a major theme of his writing, but Dadawala emphasizes that “European languages and maps do not mark the limits of Gurnah’s literary universe. What really haunts Gurnah’s prose is the centuries-long layered history of Arab and Indian presence on the Swahili coast.”  Lynne Tillman’s next novel will be published by Peninsula Press in October. According to the publisher,

Gary Indiana. Photo: Hedi El Kholti/Seven Stories Press In the “New Books” column at Harper’s Magazine, Claire Messud writes about Gary Indiana’s essay collection, Fire Season: “It’s true that Indiana’s work can feel not wholly contemporary, insofar as it refuses ever to be nice. This, thank goodness, ensures its timelessness.”   Today is the first full day of programming at the AWP conference and bookfair, which is being hosted this year in Philadelphia. You can browse the panels on offer here. Fireflies Press has announced Dennis Lim’s new book, Tale of Cinema, on Hong Sangsoo’s film of the same name.

Rowan Ricardo Phillips. Photo: Sue Kwon Farrar, Straus and Giroux has announced its inaugural FSG Writer’s Fellowship, which proposes to support one emerging writer with $15,000 and mentorship in a yearlong program. Applications will open in April, and will be judged by Sheila Heti, Katie Kitamura, and Rowan Ricardo Phillips.  Following an investigation by a group of six historians, a Dutch publisher is pulling its book The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation from stores. Written by Rosemary Sullivan, the book identifies a Jewish notary named Arnold van den Bergh as the likely person who revealed the

Jacqueline Rose In the New York Times Magazine, a conversation with John Waters, whose debut novel, Liarmouth: A Feel-Bad Romance will be published in May. Waters explains how things have changed since he was younger: “We used political incorrectness as a weapon against our enemies, but we made fun of ourselves first. The trigger-warning crowd does not make fun.” The London Review of Books has published a collection of responses to the invasion of Ukraine. Among the twenty-eight writers represented are: Pankaj Mishra, writing about “global mimicry of the American way of war”; Jacqueline Rose discussing the dangers of

Cheryl Strayed Rebecca Donner—whose biography of Mildred Harnack, an American woman who became a spy and a central figure in the resistance against Hitler, just won the National Book Critics Circle Award—has sold I Am Sophie Scholl to Random House. According to the publisher, the new book “tells the inspiring story of the legendary German resistance member who was executed for treason at just 21 years old, and her anti-Nazi group the White Rose.” Yesterday, Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild turned ten, and to celebrate, the author released a scene that was cut from the published version of the book.

Jeremy Atherton Lin The winners of the National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced at an online ceremony last night. They are Clint Smith, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Melissa Febos, Anthony Veasna So, Diane Seuss, Rebecca Donner, and Jeremy Atherton Lin. As previously announced, novelist Percival Everett has been given the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, Merve Emre has accepted the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, and Cave Canem Foundation has recieved the Toni Morrison Achievement Award.   In a review of Deborah Cohen’s group biography Last Call at the Hotel Imperial for the New Yorker, Krithika Varagur writes

Sophie Pinkham In the New York Times, Sophie Pinkham writes about the intellectuals and political dissidents leaving Russia. Pinkham compares this exodus to the emigration from the Soviet Union in the 1970s: “It has been less than a month and the situation is evolving fast, but new émigrés do not expect to be greeted as warmly as their Soviet predecessors once were by the West.”  Tonight, the National Book Critics Circle will hold its award ceremony and reading for its 2022 prizes. The event starts at 5:30pm with a reading by award finalists hosted by Ophira Eisenberg.  At Jstor

Torrey Peters. Photo: Natasha Gornik For the Washington Post Magazine, Jacob Brogan reports on the decline of academia from this year’s sparsely attended Modern Language Association convention: “Surveying the state of the field, one might be wiser to find something, anything else to do—yet intelligent, well-informed people still enroll in graduate programs every year, sometimes even tromping off to conferences amid a pandemic.” Lambda Literary has announced the finalists of its 2022 Lammy Awards in LGBTQ literature. The honorees include Lauren Groff for Matrix, Brontez Purnell for 100 Boyfriends, Tiphanie Yanique for Monster in the Middle, Torrey Peters for

Rachel Kushner. Photo: Lucy Raven. Marina Ovsyannikova, a Russian journalist at a state-run network, faces charges for interrupting a news broadcast with an anti-war sign. In a video posted before the protest, Ovsyannikova said she regretted her role as an editor at Channel One: “I’m ashamed I told lies from the television. Ashamed that I let them zombify the Russian people,” before closing with defiant words, “It is in our power to stop this lunacy. Go to protests, don’t be scared, they can’t detain us all.”  Rachel Kushner is now writing the “Easy Chair” column for Harper’s Magazine. Kushner

George Saunders. Photo: Zach Krahmer Ayesha A. Siddiqi talks with New Inquiry editor Charlie Markbreiter about “the end of an era, its ‘main characters,’ web 2.0 the real difference between Gen Z and Millenials.” “The last decade of fiction starring single late 20s-early 30s white women recycles different iterations of the same boring, selfish, reckless, cynical and unmoored depressive figure with a dissatisfying sex life that they organize the rest of their lives around,” Siddiqi says. “The self-sabotaging white woman is to the 20teens what the flailing dad was to 90s family comedies, an era defining trope. These women

Eve Babitz The Huntington Library in San Marino, California has acquired the archive of artist and author Eve Babitz, who was a fixture of the LA art scene in the 1960s and ’70s. She is the author of Slow Days, Fast Company, Sex and Rage, and other cult classics, and died at the age of seventy-eight last year. According to Babitz’s younger sister, Mirandi Babitz, “When I told Eve that The Huntington was very interested in her archive, she said, ‘I would love to be with Blue Boy and Pinkie again, like when we were kids. It’s as classy