This Week in Writing

(Source: Random House)

• Since the start of February, more than 300 Anne Frank-related books have been destroyed in libraries across Tokyo. In an announcement last Friday (2/28), the Israeli embassy's deputy chief of mission stated: “I think everyone understands that it's a single act that doesn't represent Japanese people.” The embassy will donate replacements for the books, including several copies of Anne Frank's diary. Read more here.

• At the Oscars on Sunday night (3/2), John Ridley won his first Academy Award, Best Adapted Screenplay, for his film “12 Years as a Slave.” The story is an adaptation of Solomon Northup's 1853 memoir of the same name. Ridley is the second African-American writer to win this award.

• Justin Kaplan, literary biographer and editor of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, died Sunday. Kaplan received a Pulitzer Prize and two National Book Awards for his work. Listen to a 1992 interview with Kaplan and NPR's Terry Gross here.

• Denis Johnson's new story “The Largesse of the Sea Maiden,” was published Monday (3/3) in the New Yorker. Read the story here, and an interview with Johnson and the New Yorker's fiction editor Deborah Treisman here.

• On Thursday (3/6), George Saunders's collection Tenth of December won The Story Prize – a $20,000 award. In a statement, judges wrote: “This book is very funny and very sad.” Read the title story here, and find an interview with Saunders in Issue 27 of Hayden's Ferry Review.

• T Magazine shared photos and interviews with writers about their at-home work spaces and writing stations. See more here, from Colson Whitehead, Joyce Carol Oates, and more. 

 ~Sophie Opich