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Winners of the National Book Award Announced

Percival Everett won the National Book Award for fiction on Wednesday for his novel “James,” a propulsive and slyly funny retelling of Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” from the perspective of Huck’s companion, an enslaved man named James … The award for nonfiction was given to the anthropologist Jason De León for “Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling,” an immersive account of the nearly seven years he spent embedded with human smugglers on the U.S.-Mexico border. The book depicts traffickers as both victims and perpetrators of violence, often suffering from the same poverty as migrants. Read more

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Richard Flanagan Wins Baillie Gifford Nonfiction Prize With ‘Astonishing’ Question 7

Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 has been named winner of the Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction, making the Australian writer the first person to have won both this award and the Booker prize for fiction. Part-memoir, part-novel, part-history, Question 7 charts Flanagan’s attempt to understand his parents and Tasmania, where he is from. Read more

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People Can’t Tell the Difference Between Human and AI Poetry – and Even Prefer the Latter

According to a new paper in Nature Scientific Reports, non-expert readers of poetry cannot distinguish poetry written by AI from that written by canonical poets. Moreover, general readers tend to prefer poetry written by AI – at least until they are told it is written by a machine. Read more

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This Writer Perfected an Unusual Literary Form: Amazon Reviews

Killian’s largely five-star reviews of books, movies, poetry, CDs and the occasional object he may or may not have actually purchased (King’s BBQ Potato Salad, Aveda Sap Moss Conditioning Detangler, Gerber baby food that is “as resolutely sweet as a twenties Irving Berlin standard”) are learned, often laugh-out-loud funny, frequently moving, guilelessly enthusiastic and intellectually generous. The biggest laugh is that he conceived of a way to produce a wholly idiosyncratic art project on the ground of corporate real estate. In doing so he subverted the essentially cynical egotism of capitalism and reasserted art as, always and ever, communal. Read more

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‘Interior Chinatown’ Debuts on Hulu on November 19th

Based on Charles Yu’s award-winning book of the same name, the show follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural called Black & White. Relegated to the background, Willis goes through the motions of his on-screen job, waiting tables, dreaming about a world beyond Chinatown and aspiring to be the lead of his own story. When Willis inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, he begins to unravel a criminal web in Chinatown, while discovering his own family’s buried history and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Watch trailer

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Samantha Harvey’s ‘Beautiful and Ambitious’ Orbital Wins Booker Prize

Harvey’s tale of six fictional astronauts on the International Space Station was “unanimously” chosen as the winner after a “proper day” considering the six-strong shortlist, according to judging chair, the artist and author Edmund de Waal. “Our unanimity about Orbital recognises its beauty and ambition. It reflects Harvey’s extraordinary intensity of attention to the precious and precarious world we share”. Read more

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The Writing Tool That Mark Twain, Agatha Christie and James Joyce All Swore By

A notebook is a record of both solitude and connection. It’s a place for making real the quiet, flickering thoughts that otherwise might pass unnoticed, where words and sketches can stumble and fail. In a notebook, failure is less consequential because it’s not failure at all; it’s a necessary part of the messiness of exploration, of letting the unknown and the uncertain find form. Read more

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