Torrey Peters. Photo: Natasha Gornik The longlist for the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction has been announced. The shortlist will be revealed on April 28 and the winner on July 7. On Twitter, Torrey Peters, the first trans woman to be nominated, wrote: “I’m very honored to have DETRANSITION, BABY long-listed for the Women’s Prize. I was eligible this year due to work by those before me—especially Akwaeke Emezi. Once again, I am indebted to a sacrifice made by a black trans person. Congratulations to my fellow longlisters.” In 2019, Emezi had been nominated for the prize but asked

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster Norton Juster, author of The Phantom Tollbooth, died on Monday at the age of ninety-one. “His singular quality was being mischievous,” said Jules Feiffer, the cartoonist who drew the illustrations for Tollbooth. “He saw humor as turning everything on its head.” After merging with BuzzFeed in mid-February, 47 of HuffPost’s 190 employees have been laid off, in addition to the entire staff of HuffPost Canada. According to writer Laura Bassett, employees “were invited to a meeting…with the password ‘spring is here,’” and told that many of them would be let go. Staff were

Jessica Winter. Photo: Adrian Kinloch At The Atlantic, George Packer reviews a new book about women reporters in Vietnam. Elizabeth Becker’s You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War covers the work of reporters Frances FitzGerald and Kate Webb, and photographer Catherine Leroy. Packer writes of FitzGerald, a twenty-something Radcliffe graduate and daughter of a CIA official: “Sheltered all her life, she was profoundly shocked by the suffering of the Vietnamese—not just the death, injury, and displacement, but the loss of identity under the crushing weight of the Americans.” In the new issue of Columbia

Cathy Park Hong In an effort to make its membership more diverse, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, once made up almost entirely of Christian white men, is increasing the number of inductees for the first time since 1908. “We’re expanding the membership so that it is more clearly representative of this country,” says the academy’s president, architect Billie Tsien. “Also, it’s a matter of numbers. When the academy was first established, the population was much smaller. Now there are more people, and more kinds of people.” New writers who have been inducted this year include US poet

Emily Nemens. Photo: James Emmerman Emily Nemens has resigned from her position as editor of the Paris Review to work on her second novel. In a note published on the magazine’s website, Nemens writes: “Hopefully, eventually, I’ll edit again—connecting writers to readers is among the world’s best professions.” Jewish Currents is launching an investigative fund with the Puffin Foundation. Journalists published by the fund will earn at least one dollar per word, and receive fact-checking and legal support. Jewish Currents is seeking pitches for stories that will attempt to “hold those in power accountable by investigating important issues that

Joy Williams. Photo: Penguin Random House David Brooks is leading an Aspen Institute project called Weave, a movement dedicated to “repairing our country’s social fabric, which is badly frayed by distrust, division and exclusion.” Weave is funded by Facebook and other large donors, but while Brooks has promoted the project in his columns for the New York Times and written about the social media giant, he has not disclosed his financial ties to them. When BuzzFeed News asked a Times spokesperson if they were aware of Brooks’s second salary, they declined to comment. Joy Williams is publishing her first

Hanif Abdurraqib. Photo: Megan Leigh Barnard Yuka Igarashi, the editor in chief of Soft Skull Press and founder of Catapult magazine, will join Graywolf as an executive editor in April. “We needed a fresh vision to shake us up a bit, and to help guide our talented rising editors,” said Graywolf publisher Fiona McCrae in a statement on the hire. At Hyperallergic, Cyndii Wilde Harris selects a few highlights—including interviews with Mamie Till Mobley and Angela Davis—from the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, which collects and preserves materials with the Library of Congress and GBH Boston. In the premier

Terry Castle For the London Review of Books, Terry Castle writes about a new “unsavory” biography of Patricia Highsmith, which Castle tried to finish during the January 6 mob assault on the US capitol: “The same ugly question kept intruding: would house-wrecker Highsmith – everyone’s favourite mess-with-your-head morbid misanthrope – have relished the day’s cascading idiocy?” For more Castle on Highsmith, see Bookforum’s Summer 2016 issue, in which Castle wrote about Todd Haynes’s Carol, based on Highsmith’s 1952 lesbian-romance-thriller, The Price of Salt: “It’s a commonplace that this [novel] is ‘different’ from other Highsmith fiction. I disagree. It’s true

Parul Sehgal. Photo: Beowulf Sheehan Astra publishing house is launching a new literary magazine. Astra Quarterly will “have a strong international focus” and an “international network of editors.” Nadja Spiegelman, former online editor of the Paris Review and author of the memoir I’m Supposed to Protect You from All This, will be the editor in chief. According to Spiegelman: “I am delighted to join the Astra team in its deep desire to uphold voices across borders. The new generation of readers—from New York to Lagos, Paris to Shanghai, Mexico City to Berlin—has more in common than ever before. We

Christine Smallwood. Photo: New York Institute for the Humanities A new study surveying journalists from Virginia, Missouri, Arizona, and Texas alongside published coverage of anti-racism protests in those states between 2018 and 2019 shows gaps “between how journalists thought they covered protests, and actual published protest coverage.” Summer Harlow, one of the researchers behind the study, breaks down how mainstream news can delegitimize social movements. For Columbia Journalism Review, Akintunde Ahmad interviews Michael Tubbs, the former mayor of Stockton, California, about governing in a news desert. Tubbs was the target of a disinformation campaign by a local news site

Laura Poitras. Photo: Katy Scoggin At New York magazine’s Intelligencer, Sarah Jones and Peter Sterne take an in-depth look at why Laura Poitras left First Look Media, the independent media company she cofounded with Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, and Laura Poitras. At The Nation, Jennifer Wilson reviews Elena Ferrante’s newest novel, The Lying Life of Adults, and considers how class plays out in the Italian author’s work. It’s usually an uneasy proposition, as the characters contend with conflicted feelings about their upbringing, as Wilson writes, “The Lying Life of Adults lives in the emotionally fraught distance between the characters’

Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Photo: Elsa Dorfman Lila Shapiro talks with nine top publishing executives hired amid the industry’s reckoning with its longstanding whiteness about their hopes and expectations for their new roles. Lisa Lucas, formerly of the National Book Foundation, would like to rethink how entry-level staff are compensated at Pantheon and Schocken Books. Jamia Wilson, formerly of Feminist Press, will focus on equity and inclusion on Random House’s list in part by “having people who represent the fullness and diversity of who we are, at all different levels of decision-making.” Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Beat poet and cofounder of San Francisco’s

Emily Greenhouse. Photo: New York Review of Books Emily Greenhouse has been named editor of the New York Review of Books, and her colleagues Jana Prikryl, Daniel Drake, and Maya Chung will also take on new roles. LitHub has a helpful—and very detailed—explainer of the memes mentioned in Patricia Lockwood’s new novel, No One Is Talking About This (there are more than fifty memes covered). If you understand why the eels of London are are on cocaine but are still wondering why “sneaze” is funnier than “sneeze,” see Audrey Wollen’s essay on the book in the forthcoming issue of

Victor LaValle. Photo: Teddy Wolff Boom Studios has announced that it will publish a new comic by novelist Victor LaValle (Big Machine, The Changeling, and The Devil in Silver) and artist Jo Mi-Gyeong. Eve, a five-issue series, will be released in May. Says LaValle: “What kind of planet are we leaving to our kids? This is the question that spawned my comic book. It’s an old one, of course. Many generations have wrestled with it, but the question has never been as immediate. But I didn’t want to write some grim story about how this joint went to hell.

Torrey Peters At Jewish Currents, Haley Mlotek talks with composer Ethan Philbrick and writer Torrey Peters about what divorce has meant for their work. Philbrick belongs to The Gay Divorcees, a musical ensemble of nine “real-life queers who got gay married and gay divorced,” and Peters is the author of the novel Detransition, Baby, which she wrote following her own divorce. For Peters, reading books by cis women about divorce helped her identify the audience she wanted to write her novel for: “I was like, ‘There’s a way of seeing the world that these women seem to have.’ Which

Toni Morrison. Photo: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders. Knopf/Doubleday Today would have been Toni Morrison’s ninetieth birthday. To celebrate, the New York Times offers guidance on which Morrison books to start with. At Colorlines, author and professor Obery Hendricks remembers Morrison, a friend since the two met in the 1990s at Princeton: “Toni was an international figure fully astride every literary stage of significance and knew it, but other than using her fame as leverage to help others, Toni wore that fame very lightly.” For more Morrison, check out her 2013 appearance at the New York Public Library with Junot Díaz. Roxane

Bernard Ferguson The publisher of the Chicago Tribune and the Daily News—Tribune Publishing—has agreed to give Alden Global Capital full ownership of the company. Alden has a history of dramatically cutting costs at the papers under its control, and has been pursuing ownership of Tribune, of which it is already a 32 percent stakeholder, for years. In the New York Times, Marc Tracy indicates the magnitude of the deal: “The combination of Tribune and MediaNews Group, an Alden-controlled chain of roughly 100 newspapers, including more than 60 dailies, would put another significant chunk of newspaper publishing under the strong

Marcel Proust,1895. Photo: Otto Wegener. French publisher Gallimard has announced a new book of unseen work by Marcel Proust, Les Soixante-quinze feuillets (The Seventy-Five Pages). The manuscript, written in 1908, is said to shed light on the author’s masterwork, In Search of Lost Time, and was discovered in the archives of publisher Bernard de Fallois. Gallimard is calling the discovery a “thunderclap” and promises that the book is a “Proustian grail.” At Hazlitt, an interview with Jeremy Atherton Lin, author of Gay Bar: Why We Went Out: “I think a lot of people who are younger than myself presumed

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie If the original Congressional Commission had been present for Trump’s second impeachment, writes David Remnick at the New Yorker, it probably would have, like the majority of Republicans in the Senate, voted to acquit. “But history—history as it is assembled through the rigorous accumulation and analysis of fact—will not be so forgiving….” At The Atlantic, Trumpocalypse author David Frum writes of the acquittal: “You say that you are disappointed? That a mere rebuke was not enough? That justice was not done? It wasn’t. But now see the world from the other side, through the eyes of

Sarah Weinman. Photo: Anna Ty Bergman New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet has responded to criticism of the paper’s recent statement announcing reporter Donald McNeil’s resignation following a Daily Beast story revealing his use of a racial slur. Baquet and managing editor Joe Kahn told staff that the paper does not “tolerate racist language regardless of intent.” Baquet has since clarified: “Of course intent matters when we are talking about language in journalism.” Paula Mejía remembers her former professor and celebrated fiction writer H. G. Carrillo, who, after his death from COVID-19 in April, was revealed to have