New Orleans

Attica Locke has been named the winner of the 2013 Ernest J. Gaines Award. The award for literary excellence is given to an emerging African American author and comes with a prize of $10,000. Locke, an L.A.-based writer, won the prize for her 2012 novel "The Cutting Season," which was published by Dennis Lehane's imprint. That and her debut, "Black Water Rising" (2009), are both literary thrillers that have hit bestseller lists as well as garnering critical acclaim. She has been shortlisted for the Orange Prize and was an L.A. Times Book Prize finalist.

Last September, author Junot Diaz spoke to a standing-room-only audience at Town Hall in Seattle. Within the first few minutes, he gave the city props for approving a $122 million library levy the previous month. That’s how Seattle rolls.

It’s a book town and proud of it. Seattle always ranks at the top of the list of the most literary cities, dueling with Minneapolis and Washington, DC. Amazon and Costco are headquartered here. We thought we’d head to the Pacific Northwest and see what the publishing scene is all about. And what we found was a vibrant literary community with a lot of publishing options. It just doesn’t look like what you’d expect.

From Kodiak to Key West, Concord to Carlsbad, Grand Forks to Galveston, in 6,200 towns and cities across America, more than 25,000 World Book Night U.S. volunteers will go out and personally hand out a half million free books to new or light readers on one day: April 23, 2013.

The Slate Book Review and the Center for Cartoon Studies are proud to announce the nominees for the first Cartoonist Studio Prizes. The winner in each of our two categories will be announced on March 1; each winner will receive $1,000 and, of course, eternal glory. The shortlists were selected by Slate Book Review editor Dan Kois, the faculty and students at the Center for Cartoon Studies, and this year’s guest judge, legendary New Yorker art editor Françoise Mouly.

Do the poor “deserve” e-readers? That’s the question a photo in a newspaper story raised recently. In a New Orleans Times-Picayune story discussing concerns over dust from a building demolition in New Orleans affecting people who live in a nearby public housing project, a photo showed an 8-year-old boy using an iPad. It was just [...]

On the Harvard Business Review blog, Justin Fox take a look at the 3-day-a-week downsizing of papers in Huntsville, Alabama and New Orleans, making those the first two major metropolitan areas without an actual “daily” newspaper—but not, Fox predicts, the last. Fox believes that local newspapers were always doomed—not because the Internet is better at [...]