Literature

Of the names announced by the National Book Foundation, four will take home the literary prize in November. Jesmyn Ward, Jennifer Egan and Frank Bidart number among the longlists' familiar faces.

Among the winners were Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad for fiction, The Washington Post's David Fahrenthold for national reporting and The East Bay Times for breaking news reporting.

A professor shared book acknowledgment pages, where men thanked their wives for typing their manuscripts. #ThanksForTyping soon sparked a conversation on women and their uncredited roles in academia.

The authors — who won awards in the fiction and nonfiction categories, respectively — were just two of the writers who emerged Thursday with one of the literary world's most renowned prizes.

Ali Cobby Eckermann, an Australian indigenous poet forcibly taken from her family as a child, discovered without warning last week she had just won one of the richest literary prizes in the world.

The French novelist Marcel Proust is regularly listed among the greatest writers of the 20th century. But how did the man move? A professor says the answer is on a wedding film over 110 years old.

In Bill Broun's dystopian Night of the Animals, zoo-bound creatures ask the main character to let them out. "It's a kind of fulcrum between the old world and a kind of liberating cataclysm," he says.

Irina Reyn's new novel focuses on two women in difficult marriages. Though they're centuries apart, both relationships are tied to the strong woman's struggle to fulfill gender expectations.

The versatile author says that, like queens, writers are born into their profession. In her new book, Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays, she examines current and past literature.

In a long discussion on Twitter, one critic called the illustrations "candy coated images of slavery." The illustrator says these images have been taken out of context.