Literarily famous emotion-haver and interior decorator Ayelet Waldman got mad this week at the news that the novel she'd published this year, Love & Treasure, had failed to make the New York Times Book Review's list of 100 notable books of 2014.

William Faulkner gives a speech upon receiving the National Book Award in 1955 for A Fable, which was also awarded the Pulitzer Prize. [Photo by Peter Stackpole/Getty Images]

Toni Morrison doesn't need to write another book. She's published 1o celebrated fiction titles and won nearly every award there is to win as an author (a Nobel, Pulitzer Prize, and Presidential Medal of Freedom are among her honors). But, no matter! Toni Morrison is pulling a Toni Morrison—again. The distinguished author is set to release her new novel, God Help the Child, in April.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, President Obama, along with daughters Sasha and Malia, stopped by Politics and Prose, an independent bookstore based in the nation's capital. The First Family purchased 17 books in total—ranging from Jacqueline Woodson's brave memoir in verse Brown Girl Dreaming to Katherine Rundell's magical Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms.

On Wednesday night Jacqueline Woodson won the 2014 National Book Award for Young Peoples Literature. After she left the stage the host of the National Book Awards, Daniel Handler, told the crowd that she, a Black woman, "was allergic to watermelon" and then implored the crowd at the National Book Awards to "let that settle in your mind." I found myself staring at my laptop and choking on a waterfall of watermelon seeds.

Jonathan Franzen, master of his own author photo propaganda, has a new binding of pages with words written on them coming out in... ten months. It is called Purity. Have you ever been more excited to read a work of lidərəCHər in your entire life?

Over the weekend, a YA novelist named Kathleen Hale published a piece in The Guardian that sent up a social media mushroom cloud. The piece tracked, in painstaking detail, her obsession with a Goodreads reviewer who'd given her novel only one star accompanied by snarky review. The saga ends in a trip to the reviewer's house.

I don't think it's any surprise the publishing industry—print and digital—is overwhelmingly white. But the statistics are far more upsetting than you might imagine: a recent Publisher's Weekly survey revealed the makeup of the industry to be 89 percent white, 3 percent Asian, 3 percent Hispanic, 3 percent mixed race, 1 percent black, and 1 percent other. Twenty-eight percent of respondents admitted that many publishing houses suffer from a lack of racial diversity.

Katha Pollitt is a longtime columnist at The Nation, where her funny and sharp editorials have won her awards and much acclaim. She's also a celebrated poet. This week she has a new book out, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights. It's getting raves everywhere.

Every year when Nobel time rolls around, people say America's Last Top Novelist Philip Roth should get it. Sometimes, those people are Philip Roth. In the New York Times, Dwight Garner quotes him today: "I wonder if I had called 'Portnoy's Complaint' 'The Orgasm Under Rapacious Capitalism,' if I would thereby have earned the favor of the Swedish Academy."

As someone old enough to vaguely remember when the whole high/low cultural divide was kind of settled, its vehement revival these days, especially with regard to books, is befuddling.

“Writing in general by black men from the south is very slim. To the degree that it exists—it’s women.” It’s a Thursday in early October and we’re at The Lamb’s Club in Midtown, a high-priced food depository where hundred-dollar business lunches have become daily rituals. Amid the clatter of silverware and conversation, New York Times columnist Charles Blow opens up about his new memoir, Fire Shut Up in My Bones—a stirring testimony of growing up in Louisiana and discovering what it means to be a man.

Flavorwire interviewed Matthew Klickstein, a man you've never heard of before, about his book, SLIMED! An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age. Mid-interview he decided to wax philosophic about diversity in the terms above. Now, I suspect, his "woman" publicist and "woman" editor both wish he were dead.

It's not often that you find a literary essayist wandering into contemporary political debates, these days. But in her new book On Immunity: An Innoculation, Eula Biss wades calmly, lucidly into a subject that has most people screaming in under 15 seconds on talk shows: vaccination.

A professor at Swarthmore has decided to embark on a biography of the still-living (at least at last report) novelist Jonathan Franzen. One can only imagine the anticipatory salivation at Oprah's Book Club headquarters.

James Frey, a liar and former Gawker intern, has a new project forthcoming, and it's a doozy.

Deborah Mitford, the last of the "Mitford Girls," died this week in England at the age of 94. She and her five sisters, Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity and Jessica (called Decca), were the Middletons of their day. That is, if Kate had literary talent, and was ever called upon to utter a political opinion. And if Pippa married a fascist.

Last season, the Minnesota Vikings paid a man named Jared Allen more than a million dollars per game to maul opposing quarterbacks. The "market"— meaning us, the fans—has determined that Allen's value is roughly $18.5 million per year. The State of Minnesota pays an elementary school teacher an average of $38,000 per year. Paramedics make $42,000; cops, $28,000. That makes one quarterback mauler worth 474 elementary school teachers.

Post-the-Fappening, post-Amanda Todd, post Anita Sarkeesian, it is very hard to deny that the internet has a Harassment Problem. Not that people don't try it, nonetheless.

As kids, the three du Maurier sisters—Angela, Daphne and Jeanne—had a code. Something "wain" was embarrassing, a "crumb" was a boast, a "tell him" was to be boring, to "nim" was to pee. Someone "beady" was observant. All three girls grew up "beady" themselves.