Parul Sehgal Wins NBCC Award for Excellence in Reviewing

Still deciding what to do this Friday night? Watch PBS’s new documentary on Alice Walker, Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth, at 9 p.m. EST. At The Daily Beast, Agunda Okeyo discusses the history of the film’s production, which took six years. “Stories about women of color told by women of color are sidelined and neglected in favor of our stories being told by white women and men,” director Pratibha Parmar says.

A San Francisco prisoner wanted to read werewolf erotica so badly that he took it to state court. The case has brought up problems with prison censorship and calls to mind Avi Steinberg’s memoir, Running the Books: Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian (here’s our review.)

Last week, I wrote about Caleb Crain’s entry in By Heart, a series at The Atlantic in which prominent writers talk about their favorite passages. Now, & Sons author David Gilbert talks about Moby Dick, which he says is “one of a few books [he’s] dreamed about.”