Italian author, poet and translator Erri De Luca has added another accolade to his glittering career – although this may be one he would prefer to have avoided. The winner of the 2013 European Prize for Literature, hailed as “writer of the decade” by Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera in 2009, has won the 24th annual Literary Review Bad sex award for a passage in his novel The Day Before Happiness.

De Luca’s win was announced at a ceremony at the appropriately named In and Out club in London on Wednesday night. The excerpt that swayed the judges involved the Neapolitan orphan protagonist and a mysterious woman he has watched from afar.

He writes: “My prick was a plank stuck to her stomach. With a swerve of her hips, she turned me over and I was on top of her. She opened her legs, pulled up her dress and, holding my hips over her, pushed my prick against her opening. I was her plaything, which she moved around. Our sexes were ready, poised in expectation, barely touching each other: ballet dancers hovering en pointe.”

De Luca was unable to attend and his publisher at Allen Lane accepted the prize on his behalf.

The book beat stiff competition from a shortlist that included former Blue Peter presenter Janet Ellis for a passage in her bestselling debut The Butchers’ Hook. It likened sex to hanging out wet washing. Ethan Canin was picked for an episode in A Doubter’s Almanac where pneumatic lovers enjoy sex “like a brisk tennis game or a summer track meet, something performed in daylight between competitors. The cheap mattress bounced.”

In Men Like Air, Tom Connolly presented the eye-watering revelation that “often she cooked exotic meals and put chillies or spices in her mouth while preparing the food and sucked him while the food cooked and then told him to fuck her while his manhood was burning rock-hard with fire.” Leave Me by Gayle Forman, and The Tobacconist by Robert Seethaler were also in contention for this year’s prize.

Despite the sniggers that greet the annual announcement, the Bad sex award was established in 1993 to raise the tone rather than lower it. The then-editor of the Literary Review, Auberon Waugh, hoped the prize would “draw attention to poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description in modern fiction”. Since then it has become the one prize literary authors hope to avoid.

Last year, the singer Morrissey won for a passage in his debut novel List of the Lost, in which the protagonists “sexually violent rotation” was rendered more laughable by the description: “Eliza’s breasts barrel-rolled across Ezra’s howling mouth and the pained frenzy of his bulbous salutation extenuating his excitement as it whacked and smacked its way into every muscle of Eliza’s body except for the otherwise central zone.”

However, De Luca joins an illustrious group of past recipients. As well as Morrissey, bad sex writing by the likes of Melvyn Bragg, Sebastian Faulks, Norman Mailer and Ben Okri has also received the unwelcome accolade.

Americans trying to unpick the phenomenon of Donald Trump have turned to a late left-leaning academic, who predicted that old industrialized democracies were heading into a Weimar-like period in which populist movements could overturn constitutional governments.

In 1998, the late Stanford philosopher Richard Rorty published a small volume, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, that described a fracturing of the leftwing coalition that rendered the movement so dispirited and cynical that it invited its own collapse.

In the days after Trump’s electoral college victory over Hillary Clinton, passages from Rorty’s book went viral, shared thousands of times on social media. Rorty’s theories were then echoed by the New Yorker editor David Remnick in an interview with Barack Obama and essay on his presidency, and taken up across the internet as an explanation for Trump’s success.

In the book, Rorty predicted that what he called the left would come to give “cultural politics preference over real politics”. This movement would contribute to a tidal wave of resentment, he wrote, that would ricochet back as the kind of rancor that the left had tried to eradicate.

Rorty suggested that so long as “the proles can be distracted from their own despair by media-created pseudo-events, including the brief and bloody war, the super-rich will have little to fear”.

But as democratic institutions began to fail, workers would begin to realize that governments were “not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or jobs from being exported”, Rorty wrote. They would also realize that the middle classes – themselves desperately afraid of being downsized – would not come to their rescue.

“At that point,” Rorty wrote, “something will crack.”

“The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for – someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.”

Rorty said “nobody can predict” what such a strongman would do in office, but painted a bleak picture for minorities and liberal causes. “One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out,” he wrote. “Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion.”

Intolerance and “sadism” would “come flooding back”, he continued. “All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.”

Rorty, a hero of the old left, hoped his peers would abandon what he perceived as anti-Americanism and return to a more pure-hearted, pragmatic view of liberalism. But he did not hold out much hope. Ultimately, he wrote, the so-called strongman would be powerless to do anything but “worsen economic conditions” and “quickly make his peace with the international superrich”.

Trump appears to have already fulfilled this prediction, filling his transition team with lobbyists, including for the oil, telecoms and food industries. He has named a Republican loyalist to be his chief of staff, and a far-right nationalist – himself a former Goldman Sachs executive – as his “chief strategist”.

Rorty was not the first or last academic to predict the tectonic shifts of politics caused by technology, globalization and liberal movements. His ideas about voters turning away from the world, against “elites” and scapegoated minorities, were echoed by the historian Samuel Huntington in 2004 and by Noam Chomsky in 2010.

In 1994, the historian Edward Luttwak noted “the completely unprecedented personal economic insecurity of working people”. Writing in the London Review of Books that year, he saw opportunity for “a product-improved fascist party” that would dedicate itself to “broad masses of (mainly) white-collar working people”.

This year, however, Luttwak wrote a May op-ed in the Wall Street Journal urging calm at prospect of a Trump presidency, which he said would not be as extreme as his rhetoric.

An original drawing from the popular Tintin adventure Explorers on the Moon has sold for a record €1.55m (£1.3m) in Paris, auction house Artcurial has announced.

The 50cm x 35cm drawing in Chinese ink by the Belgian cartoonist known as Hergé shows the boy reporter, his dog, Snowy, and sailor Captain Haddock wearing spacesuits and walking on the moon while looking at Earth. It had been expected to sell for between €700,000 and €900,000.

“It’s simply fantastic. It’s an exceptional price for an exceptional piece,” said Artcurial’s comics expert, Eric Leroy. He described Explorers on the Moon as “a key moment in the history of comic book art ... it has become legendary for many lovers and collectors of comic strips”.

Leroy added: “It is one of the most important from Hergé’s postwar period, on the same level as Tintin in Tibet and The Castafiore Emerald.” The 1954 book is viewed as one of Hergé’s masterpieces.

Saturday’s sale was a record for a single cartoon drawing. In 2012, the 1932 cover illustration of Tintin in America fetched €1.3m.

Hergé already holds the world record for the sale of a comic strip. A double-page ink drawing that served as the inside cover for all the Tintin adventures published between 1937 and 1958, sold for €2.65m to an American fan two years ago.

Original Tintin comic book drawings have been fetching millions at auctions in recent years. In February 2015, the original cover design for The Shooting Star almost matched the record when it was sold for €2.5m.

In May the original artwork for the last two pages of the King Ottokar’s Sceptre book sold for $1.2m (£1m), while in October 2015, a double-page slate from the same Tintin book fetched more than €1.5m. That same month, an Asian investor paid $1.2m for a drawing from The Blue Lotus book, published in 1936, of Tintin and Snowy in Shanghai.

Alongside the moon drawings, Artcurial also sold 20 ink sketches Hergé created for a series of new year greeting cards known as his “snow cards”. The drawings, including Tintin and Snowy skiing, or hapless detectives the Thompson twins ice-skating, brought in €1.2m.

Prices for cartoon art have multiplied tenfold in the last decade, according to gallery owner Daniel Maghen.

The 1954 Explorers on the Moon completes the lunar adventure started in Destination Moon (1953).

The sales come as Tintin-mania again grips Paris, with Hergé the subject of a huge retrospective exhibition at the Grand Palais.

Hergé sold about 230m Tintin books by the time of his death in 1983.

The main complainant involved in the sacking of author Steven Galloway from his job at the University of British Columbia has denied that her complaints were about a two-year consensual affair between the two of them, as his lawyer had announced last week.

Galloway, the author of The Cellist of Sarajevo, was fired from his role as creative writing chairman at UBC in June, after being suspended pending investigation for “serious allegations’’ in November 2015. When one of several allegations was found to have been substantiated by the investigation, Galloway was fired; since then, UBC has repeatedly said that it could not reveal details of the alleged offence without the author’s consent, or they would be in breach of privacy laws.

The case made international headlines last week when more than 80 Canadian authors, including Margaret Atwood, Madeleine Thien and Yann Martel, signed an open letter voicing concerns over how the university had handled his dismissal.

But on 23 November, Galloway issued a public statement through his lawyer for the first time since his suspension, confirming that he had been accused of numerous incidents of misconduct, including sexual assault. However, the statement said that the only substantiated allegation found in the investigation by former state judge Mary Ellen Boyd was that he had a two-year affair with a student. Both Galloway and the student were married at the time.

“Mr Galloway profoundly regrets his conduct and wishes to apologise for the harm that it has caused. He does not seek to minimise it or to hide from it,” the statement said.

Galloway’s statement said that the investigation dismissed all the other allegations, including the claim of sexual assault in 2011. “He seeks fair treatment for all involved, and an end to the scurrilous assertions and accusations that have proliferated in the vacuum of information,” the statement continued.

However, the student involved, identified only as MC or main complainant, later also released a statement through her lawyer. She claims that her report to UBC had not been over a consensual affair, but that Galloway had sexually assaulted and sexually harassed her.

“Mr Galloway has issued an apology. But he wouldn’t appear to be apologising for the finding he has admitted was made against him by Ms Boyd, which was misconduct for ‘inappropriate sexual behaviour with a student’: conduct which is an abuse of trust and his position of power,’’ the statement said.

“Mr Galloway has not made clear to whom he is apologising or what he regrets, other than presumably the consequences to him. His reference to … the events does not explicitly consider the devastating impacts of abuse of power on women affected.”

UBC told the Guardian it would not be making a statement, and referred to its conflict of interest policy, which states that faculty members must avoid or declare relationships with their students, and that they should not grade or supervise a student with whom they have a personal relationship without declaring it. It previously said the investigation had revealed “a record of misconduct that resulted in an irreparable breach of trust”.

Many of the authors who signed the open letter calling for an investigation into UBC’s handling of the case faced a backlash. The issue has divided Canada’s literary scene between the more established authors who signed the letter and the many young, emerging authors who took to social media – and letters in response – to criticise them, arguing that the prestige of the authors would deter those wanting to report possible sexual harassment and assault.

In October, Thien wrote a separate letter to UBC saying that Galloway had experienced severe distress since he was fired. She stressed that she was not taking the allegations lightly, having herself “known the terrible and lasting pain of sexual assault”. But, she told the Guardian: “My belief in due process and my belief in survivors are both parts of me, and I cannot sacrifice one for the other. It would be like ripping myself in two.”

Oxford literary festival has announced that it will in future pay all authors who appear there. The news follows an 11-month standoff prompted by Philip Pullman’s resignation as patron on the basis that it was no longer acceptable to expect writers to “work for nothing”.

Pullman’s resignation followed a wave of anger from leading authors, 30 of whom went on to sign a letter calling for a boycott of the event, which will celebrate its 21st year in April.

A statement posted on the festival website on Tuesday announced that after conferring with interested parties, it had “rebalanced our budgets” in order to pay “£150 to all authors speaking at the 2017 festival and thereafter”.

Joanne Harris, festival patron and a member of the Society of Authors’ management committee, called it “super good news”. “It was a very tricky situation last year when Philip pulled out because I thought ‘Really, I should do the same’,” Harris told the Guardian. “But I also wanted to fix things from within and add my voice to those of the Society of Authors, who were telling [OLF] to rethink their model. I am so pleased they have, so I can keep supporting them and do so without feeling I am being torn between two things I believe in.”

Author fees vary widely between the UK’s 350 literary festivals; the Edinburgh international book festival pays £200 per author per event, while the Cambridge literary festival offers authors £100, plus accommodation, where requested. Authors at Hay festival are paid varying amounts, in either cash or wine. There is currently an informal agreement amongst Scottish festivals to pay a standard rate of £150 or more per author per event, though the Scottish Book Trust, which funds many festivals north of the border, has announced that its rates are increasing to £170 plus expenses in 2017.

The average earnings for a professional full-time author in the UK is just £12,500, according to a recent European commission report, well below the minimum wage for a full-time job (£18,000).

Harris, who has only attended festivals that pay in 2016, said she was not consulted on the plans but that she had “certainly made my opinion known – and I was not the only one who had severe misgivings”.

“These festivals work terribly hard to do something we all believe in. But why would everything else be paid for and not the guests? It is not about me wanting £150, it is about the principle – and about the authors who are genuinely strapped for cash. Authors look at festivals and think ‘Can I afford to go?’ That is bad for festivals and the public.”

The Society of Authors praised the decision as setting a precedent for other book festivals. “We believe Oxford literary festival’s decision to join others that already offer payment to authors sets an excellent example to those that don’t. Like Oxford, any festival can review its finances to see who it is paying and who is being left out of pocket, and question whether that balance should be better,” the statement read.

But Nicola Solomon, Society of Authors chief executive, told the Guardian that Oxford had been asked for an assurance that it would pay VAT and expenses on top of the fee. And even so, she said, “My feeling that £150 plus VAT and expenses is a little on the low side for a major festival. Although an event may only be an hour, an author seldom loses less than a day when you take into account preparation and travel. We recommend Andrew Bibby’s reckoner, which shows daily rates to equate with different salaries. Using that reckoner a fee of £150 equates to an annual salary of £13,500.”

Pullman said: “Authors have had to cope with declining incomes for 20 years or so now — not because people weren’t buying our books, but because they weren’t being sold at a fair price. The recognition that the people who bring in the audiences are actually entitled to a cut of the profits is something I’m very glad to welcome, and I hope the principle of fairness will spread throughout the entire literary and musical and artistic economy.”

While OLF’s commitment falls short of the £200-£300 that Solomon told the Guardian podcast she felt authors should be paid earlier this year, Harris said the announced fee was not unusual for a festival. “If this goes ahead and works, they may be able to pay more in future,” she said. “What they will lose from one part of the budget, they may well gain back from the extra support they’ll get for being perceived as being supportive of authors.”

However, the precedent is already worrying other festival organisers. Cathy Moore, director of Cambridge festival, which has just hosted 35 events over a weekend, said they had various policies on author pay, such as not paying local writers but offering them complementary tickets to other events, but paying debut authors “because I think they need it.” Of the 28 authors eligible for payment over the weekend, 16 had requested it.

“But it’s very difficult and complex,” she said, “and my fear is that if we were to pay everyone a set rate, agreed with the Society of Authors, we’d end up with dumbed down generic festivals because, in order to survive financially, we’d have to programme according to commercial rather than strategic or artistic criteria”.

The chair of the judges for the inaugural Jhalak prize, the author Sunny Singh, has branded British publishers “pathetic” after the award created to recognise black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) writers received only 51 submissions so far.

The £1,000 prize was set up to recognise “[authors] who feel that their work is often marginalised unless it fulfils a romantic fetishisation of their cultural heritage”. Despite the deliberately broad entry requirements – it is open to BAME writers based in the UK working in any genre, regardless of whether they are self-published or with a publisher – the award has received startlingly few entries, with only two weeks to go until submissions close.

“It is not that we won’t be able to award a book that is deserving, but that there are obviously not enough books being published by BAME authors,” said Singh.

The Jhalak prize was announced in February after the 2015 Writing the Future report found that the best chance of publication for writers of colour was to write literary fiction conforming to a stereotypical view of their communities, addressing topics such as “racism, colonialism or postcolonialism, as if these were the primary concerns of all BAME people”. At the time, the co-founder of the prize, the author Nikesh Shukla, said that “a perfect loop-de-loop of blame” existed in the industry, where publishers blamed agents for the lack of diversity, while agents blamed a lack of available talent and writers blamed publishers.

Singh expects they will receive one or two dozen more by the time submissions close at the end of November, but said she is disappointed with the overall figure so far, and that the bulk of entries had come from independent and small presses. She estimated that 70% of submissions had come from small publishers such as Profile and Hope Road.

“This suggests there is a serious problem in the bigger publishers,” she said. “We’ve got loads of stuff from tiny publishers, really tiny ones. But where are the big ones? The fact is that they’re not publishing.”

She called the lack of debut and up-and-coming BAME authors “pathetic, truly pathetic” and said the fact that publishers were submitting big names for the prize was a sign that the attention of industry was too focused on a small number of high-profile writers. “The publisher Hamish Hamilton submitted Zadie Smith’s latest book,” she said. “You really need to send me Zadie Smith for a tiny prize in its first year? That’s pathetic.”

Singh said she and her fellow judges had been personally contacting publishers to remind them that submissions remain open. “People know it exists, so it is not that they aren’t aware.”

In November, the Bookseller magazine found that an author was more likely to reach the bestseller list if their name was David than if they were from an ethnic minority. The analysis found a “shockingly low” number of books by British BAME authors in the top 500 titles of the year to date.

After the 2015 Writing the Future report found that 74% of publishers employed by large companies described the industry as only “a little diverse” or “not diverse at all”, the UK publishing industry has made moves to address the lack of diversity. Changes have been made at the Big Four publishers in the last year: Penguin Random House launched a series of writing workshops around the UK called Write Now and removed the requirement that would-be employees needed a university degree, and Hachette announced it would begin paying interns and also offer two 12-month internships for BAME applicants. HarperCollins imprint 4th Estate, meanwhile, introduced a short story prize for BAME writers, in association with the Guardian.

David Roth-Ey, executive publisher of 4th Estate, said the company was “committed to expanding our list, as well as improving the diversity of our workforce, but there’s clearly more work to be done ... In my view, there is a new urgency among publishers to find and publish British BAME authors, and I’m pleased that initiatives such as the Jhalak prize will shine a light on their work.”

According to Danuta Kean, who edited the Writing the Future report, the lack of submissions for the Jhalak prize reveals that publishers still have work ahead. “It also reflects a failure at some publishers to support their BAME authors by submitting them to the kind of prizes that will put them on the map and help establish their careers,” Kean said.

She added that the big publishers do have many more debuts from BAME authors lined up for 2017. “I just hope they get the marketing spend [and that] this increase is about real commitment to diversity in the literary world and not just gesture politics,” she said.

“The authors are out there. It is the fault of the publishers,” Singh said. “We know the problem and we know the solution. We just need the publishers to act. This is not a political or sociological issue – this is a moral issue. Publishers need to put their money where their mouths are.”

A Kickstarter campaign to fund a documentary about the US comic artist Mike Diana – the first person to receive a criminal conviction in the US for “artistic obscenity” – has surpassed its $40,000 (£32,000) goal, with enough extra money to clear the outstanding warrant for his arrest in the state of Florida.

Diana was living in Largo, Florida, when he became the first person to be convicted and jailed on obscenity charges in 1994, for his self-published comic book Boiled Angel. A jury took just 40 minutes to convict him following a sting in which an undercover police officer procured copies of Diana’s underground comic.

After spending a short period in jail on remand before sentencing, Diana was put on probation for three years, during which time he was forbidden to interact with minors or to draw. He was told that police could turn up at his home at any time to check he wasn’t breaking the terms of his sentence, so he would hide in his car at night to do his work.

Diana gained leave to serve out the last part of his probation in his native New York, but a claim that he had violated the terms of his sentence, which included doing community service, led to a warrant being issued for his arrest – meaning Diana couldn’t set foot in Florida for fear of detention.

After the Kickstarter appeal reached its $40,000 goal, a stretch goal called “Buy Mike’s freedom” was added, stipulating that if $45,000 was raised, it would be used to pay of the $2,000 fine attached to the warrant, essentially making Diana a free man again.

The director behind the documentary is Frank Henenlotter, a self-confessed “exploitation” movie maker whose credits include the cult hits Basket Case, Frankenhooker and Brain Damage. Henenlotter’s work pairs well with Diana’s, which featured graphic sex, violence and gore, but mainly in a satirical and darkly humorous vein.

Henenlotter and Diana appeared in a live internet “telethon” in the final hours of the Kickstarter appeal, which concluded at 2am GMT on Friday and pushed the total figure raised to $45,816.

Henenlotter’s Kickstarter statement said: “Does freedom of speech mean anything when authorities see only obscenity? Does an artist’s vision matter when community standards conspire to suppress it? In a small town in Florida back in 1994, Mike Diana learned that the answer was a resounding no. Freedom of speech doesn’t mean anything when your art is declared obscene. And one man’s art could be another man’s obscenity.”

Diana’s legal battle was a landmark case for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, which marks 30 years this year of funding legal representation for comic-book creators and retailers who fall foul of censorship or obscenity laws.

After a failed attempt by the FBI to link Diana’s work with the activities of the serial killer Danny Rolling, the then 25-year-old was subjected to the undercover sting that led to his conviction. Earlier this year he told the Guardian: “Largo is a very conservative place. I think they thought what I was doing was making a mockery of their community. I wanted to show them [the jury] some underground comics so they could see there was a precedent for what I was doing, but they wouldn’t look at them. If they could prove that what I was doing had no artistic or literary value, they could prosecute me.”

The Mike Diana documentary is already in production, so the Kickstarter success means it can be successfully finished, edited and distributed in 2017. Arrangements are being made to screen the film in Florida.

Author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has received an apology from the BBC, after she accused Newsnight producers of “sneakily pitting” her against a Trump supporter in a live TV interview.

Footage of Adichie’s appearance on the TV programme two weeks ago was shared widely online, particularly because of her comments. When R Emmett Tyrrell, Jr, the editor of the American Spectator, claimed president-elect Donald Trump wasn’t racist, Adichie retorted: “I’m sorry, but as a white man, you don’t get to define what racism is. You really don’t.”

The author took to Facebook on Friday to accuse the show’s producers of not telling her manager that she would be appearing with someone else, or that she would be asked so much about the US election, leaving her feeling “upset and ambushed” when she found out after arriving at the BBC studio.

The author wrote: “When I arrived at their studio in Washington DC, the show’s producer casually said, ‘You’ll be on a panel with a Trump supporter. A magazine editor who has supported Donald Trump from the beginning.’

“At no time had I been told that there would be anyone else in the interview, never mind being pitted against a Trump supporter. I felt upset and ambushed.”

Adichie said she wanted to leave at that point, but did not as she was feeling emotional about the election result. “I wanted to walk away, but decided not to. I was already there. And I did want to talk about the election, which I had experienced in a deeply personal way. I was still stunned and angry and sad. I still woke up feeling heavy. Not only because I am an enthusiastic supporter of Hillary Clinton but also because, with Donald Trump’s win, America just didn’t feel like America any more. The country that grew from an idea of freedom was now to be governed by an authoritarian demagogue.”

A producer told her that Tyrrell had been invited on the show alongside her to maintain balance. “But sneakily pitting me against a Trump supporter was not about balance – we could have easily been interviewed separately,” she said. “It is a deliberately adversarial strategy that news organisations use in the pursuit of what is often called ‘good television’. It is about entertainment.”

The author said she did not feel adversarial towards Tyrrell until he said “I do not respond emotionally like this lady.”

“To say that I responded ‘emotionally’ to the election was to say that I had not engaged my intellect,” wrote Adichie. “‘Emotional’ is a word that has been used to dismiss many necessary conversations, especially about gender or race. ‘Emotional’ is a way of discounting what you have said without engaging with it.

“No way was I going to ignore that. Which, predictably, led to an interview in which I found myself, rather than talking about misogyny and populism, responding to a man who claimed that an anti-Nafta, China-bashing, America-First Donald Trump would be an internationalist rather than an isolationist.

“Who presumed that he, a white man, could decide what was racist and what was not. And who insisted that Donald Trump is not a racist, even though the evidence is glaring, even though the House majority leader of Donald Trump’s own Republican party condemned Donald Trump’s racism. So much for responding ‘emotionally’ to the election.”

She said she left the interview “still feeling upset. But it made me better see why America no longer feels like America.”

The BBC later issued an apology to Adichie on her Facebook page, saying they felt “terribly sorry [she] felt ambushed by the encounter” and that not informing her of the nature of the interview was “an honest mistake”, but emphasised that it was not strategic.

“It’s simply not the case, though, that the casting was part of an adversarial strategy as you suggest. It would have been bizarre not to reflect the views of the half of America which had just voted for Donald Trump in the live segments of the programme,” the statement reads.

“And as a general rule, we think it seems odd to viewers when live guests do not engage with each other’s arguments. We’d always rather have light than heat, but we think a lot of people will have found your encounter with R Emmett Tyrrell quite revealing. More than anything, we’re sad and sorry you had a bad experience with us. We hope you’ll come back for a one-to-one interview some time.”

Germany has bought the California home that once belonged to the Nobel prize-winning author Thomas Mann and plans to turn it into a “centre for transatlantic dialogue”, after fears it was being sold off as a “teardown” – of value only for the land on which it stands – caused outrage among German fans of the author.

Three thousand curators and writers – including Nobel laureate Herta Müller – signed an online petition for the house to be saved after it went on the market at an asking price of $15m.

The sale was secured earlier this week after a period of hard bargaining, according to the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper. Germany’s foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, told the paper the building had been a “home for many Germans who worked toward a better future for their country, paved the way for an open society and laid the foundations for common transatlantic values”.

“We want to revive the Thomas Mann villa in that spirit,” he said. The renovation of the house is expected to take two years.

Mann fled Germany with his family in 1933, when Hitler came to power, moving first to Switzerland and then to the US, where he had the five-bedroom house in the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles built to his own specifications.

He described the project as “a reckless and self-willed prank”, writing to his brother Heinrich that he had bought “a property with seven palms and many citrus trees”.

Designed by the modernist architect JR Davidson, Mann’s house hosted a group of exiled German writers, artists and intellectuals of the Exilliteratur, a group including Bertolt Brecht and Bruno Frank, who would gather there and at the nearby home of writer Lion Feuchtwanger, the Villa Aurora, also in Pacific Palisades.

One of the visitors he received there was a 14-year-old Susan Sontag, who turned up for tea with a schoolfriend in 1947 and later wrote about the experience for the New Yorker.

As they waited for tea and cake to be served in Mann’s study, Sontag observed “the cluttered table, pens, inkstand, books, papers … and books, books, books in the floor-to-ceiling shelves that covered two of the walls”.

She continued: “To be in the same room with Thomas Mann was thrilling … But I was also hearing the siren call of the first private library I had ever seen.”

In 1952, sensing that McCarthyism was putting an end to American liberalism, the family returned to Europe. Mann died three years later in Switzerland.

As the house was put up for sale in August this year, New Yorker critic Alex Ross wrote: “The ‘magic villa’ on San Remo, as the German press calls it, is more than the home of a great writer: it is a symbol of a fraught period in American history, one that gave a refugee from nazism feelings of deja vu.”

Man Booker winner Julian Barnes has criticised opening up the UK’s premier literary prize to American writers, calling it “straightforwardly daft”.

The novelist, who won the award in 2011 for The Sense of an Ending, revealed he was firmly against the controversial changes introduced in 2014.

“I don’t agree with opening up the Booker for the Americans,” he told the Radio Times. “I think that’s straightforwardly daft. The Americans have got enough prizes of their own.

“The idea of [the Booker] being Britain, Ireland, the old Commonwealth countries and new voices in English from around the world gave it a particular character and meant it could bring on writers. If you also include Americans – and get a couple of heavy hitters – then the unknown Canadian novelist hasn’t got a chance.”

The prize was established in 1969 and has become the UK’s most coveted literary prize. This year Paul Beatty became the first US author to win for his satire of American racial politics, The Sellout.

Barnes, who once memorably called the prize “posh bingo”, believes the changes are unfair. He asked: “Which American prizes are open to Brits? In theory, I think only the National Book Award is. I don’t think any Brit has won a major American award for years.”

The 70-year-old was something of a Booker bridesmaid until winning in 2011. Before that he had been shortlisted three times, for Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), England, England (1998) and Arthur & George (2005).

His views put him in the same camp as Philip Hensher, who called the rule changes on eligibility baffling and, writing in the Guardian, said: “I don’t think I’ve ever heard so many novelists say, as over the last two or three days, ‘Well, we might as well just give up, then.’”

Melvyn Bragg believed the prize would lose its distinctiveness, saying: “It’s rather like a British company being taken over by some worldwide conglomerate.”

In the Radio Times interview Barnes also talked briefly about his falling out with his friend and fellow writer Martin Amis, which came when Amis sacked Pat Kavanagh, Barnes’s wife who died in 2008). She had worked as Amis’s agent since the start of his career but he dropped her in favour of the American super-agent Andrew Wylie, who is nicknamed the Jackal.

Barnes said of Amis: “When we meet, we talk … It’s not a problem. He lives in Brooklyn and I live in Tufnell Park.”

Barnes, who said in a 2013 interview that he believed in bearing grudges, told the Radio Times that he had changed his mind as they took up too much energy.

He will soon be heard on Radio 3, reading his essays in a series called Changing My Mind. One of those will be about politics, and he revealed that he did not use to be that interested but now was a Corbynista.

He told the magazine: “Back when I was young, Jeremy Corbyn’s views would have seemed mainstream Labour.”

The Booker rule change to widen eligibility was announced in 2013. It was, said the chair of the Man Booker trustees, Jonathan Taylor, a way of “embracing the freedom of English in its versatility, its vigour, its vitality and its glory wherever it may be. We are abandoning the constraints of geography and national boundaries.”

Many people in the books industry, however, believed it was part of a battle with a rival literary prize. Unlike the Booker, a central part of the Folio prize, also announced in 2013, was that it allowed US writers to compete.

Andrew Kidd, the founder of the Folio prize, said at the time: “We can’t help noting that the new criteria are identical to ours but, at the end of the day, there’s absolutely no reason that we can’t both flourish.”

That has not proved the case. The prize was awarded in 2014 and 2015, first to the US short story writer George Saunders and then the Indian-American novelist Akhil Sharma, before running in to trouble when the Folio Society decided not to renew its sponsorship.

It recently announced that it would be returning in 2017 when it will judge both fiction and non-fiction by rewarding the best book of the year.

Female MPs are too often written out of political history, according to Rachel Reeves, the former Labour frontbencher, who has written a new biography of the pioneering parliamentarian Alice Bacon.

Reeves, a former shadow work and pensions secretary, said the book was her contribution to redressing the balance, after she followed in the footsteps of Bacon in 2010 to become the second female MP elected in Leeds.

The biography, Alice in Westminster, due to be published this week, charts the political life of Bacon, who was an MP for 25 years from 1945 and campaigned strongly in favour of a comprehensive education system.

However, Bacon is little known outside Yorkshire, where she was born the daughter of a miner and lived for her whole career as an MP, Home Office minister in Harold Wilson’s government and later a peer.

“One of the reasons I started writing the book is that women MPs of that era tend to get written out of history,” Reeves said. “Even someone like Margaret Bondfield, who was the first woman cabinet minister, has never had a biography of her.

“Barbara Castle and Jennie Lee are really the only exceptions to that. This is a small step in trying to put that right and write them back in. Apart from the Pankhursts, who do people think about when think about women’s suffrage? I think the first women MPs have been written out of history for one reason or another.

“A lot of these women, like Alice, really made things happen. You needed Roy Jenkins in the 1960s to make social liberal reforms, but Alice also had a key role. At a time in the Labour movement when there was a lot of disquiet about homosexuality and abortion, in the Catholic part of the party and conservative trade union element, Alice by being steady and calm and lowering the temperature made reform ever more certain.”

Reeves said Bacon’s arguments for comprehensive education still have relevance today, as Labour fights against Theresa May’s plan to lift the ban on new grammar schools.

“[Anthony] Crosland got all the credit for comprehensive education, but it was Alice, plodding away in the 1940s and 50s when comprehensive education was not fashionable even in the Labour party, where there was a sort of feeling the tripartite Butler system, as long as properly implemented, was the right thing to do and children would get the education suitable for them. Alice did not believe that and was not willing to sit on the sidelines,” she said.

“In debate after debate, she talked about comprehensive education and helped changed Labour party policy on it. Unlike a lot of her colleagues, she had taught at an interwar secondary modern and had gone to a grammar. She said she knew lots of boys and girls who deserved a grammar school quality of education who were denied it.”

Reeves said the lives of female MPs have changed considerably since Bacon’s time, when few had children or wanted to be described as feminists.

However, she said female MPs still faced some inequalities, recalling the time one male Tory MP suggested she would not be able to do a frontbench cabinet job properly as a new mother.

“There are still different expectations of what women can do. And look at the online abuse that women get today. I think women suffer more from that than men do – the strongest examples would be Luciana Berger and Jess Phillips,” Reeves said. “Alice was also told to concentrate on women’s issues, rather than the economy or defence. That has changed, although still I think women are expected to champion the causes of women like childcare and the tampon tax and equal pay.”

For most of his 93 years, PG Wodehouse, the “performing flea” of English literature, was also an elephant of productivity. Up to his final hours, he wrote every day, accumulating a manuscript mountain: letters to friends, writers and composers, from Evelyn Waugh to George Gershwin, light verse, journals and journalism, libretti, short stories, plays and novels such as Right Ho, Jeeves, and The Code of the Woosters. At the peak of his career in the 1930s, he complained to a friend: “I have become a writing machine.”

Now the Observer can reveal that this lifetime of literary work has reached a remarkable climax. On Thursday, the British Library will announce that the Wodehouse archive is about to join its 20th-century holdings, a collection that includes the papers of Arthur Conan Doyle, Evelyn Waugh, Mervyn Peake, Virginia Woolf, Harold Pinter, Ted Hughes, Beryl Bainbridge, JG Ballard and Angela Carter.

This rare and brilliant archive not only casts fascinating new light on Wodehouse’s comic genius, and painstaking daily revisions of his famously carefree prose, it also holds the key to the controversy that has tormented the writer’s posthumous reputation, the “Berlin broadcasts”. Yet, unlike many authors, he made no attempt to protect this collection, which is all the more authentic for being free of authorial intervention and contrivance.

After his death on Valentine’s Day 1975, many of Wodehouse’s papers found their way to Dulwich College, his former school. Several other manuscripts were already in private hands. Everything else was steadily accumulated and catalogued by the PGW estate, under the direction of Wodehouse scholar Kristin Thompson, and stored in the attic of a farmhouse on the edge of the Sussex Downs.

Sir Edward Cazalet, the principal trustee of the writer’s estate, told the Observer he was “delighted” that the British Library would now provide the home for the PG Wodehouse archive. Cazalet said he believed that “this collection will not only bring much pleasure to its readers, but will also prove to be critical to any serious study of 20th-century humour”. He added that Wodehouse “would have been proud to be counted among his greatest literary heroes”.

This is a momentous acquisition for three outstanding reasons. First, Wodehouse is an English literary immortal, with a God-given ear for the music of an English sentence. Almost as important, he is also renowned for a cast of characters – led by Lord Emsworth, Rupert Psmith, Bertie Wooster and his manservant Jeeves, assorted aunts, Drones and butlers – whose antics, obiter dicta and exploits have passed into the language.

Second, his archive shows the writer at work in Edwardian England, for instance playing cricket with Conan Doyle, and then later in the heyday of his career during the 1920s and 30s, mixing with the showbiz world of Broadway and 30s Hollywood, from producer Irving Thalberg to Fred Astaire and Cole Porter.

Perhaps most fascinating of all, the crown jewels in this archive are the documents surviving from his imprisonment by the Nazis, notably the pencil diary he kept during internment, hitherto only available to a few scholars.

Thus, third, by placing all his wartime papers in the public domain, the Wodehouse estate should lay to rest any lingering suspicions about his conduct during the dark years of 1940-46. Now, for the first time, admirers and critics alike will be able to see the exact circumstances of his incarceration after the fall of France in 1940.

When the second world war broke out, Wodehouse was living next to the golf course in Le Touquet, as a bestselling literary expatriate. During the phoney war, he stayed in France, working on his masterpiece Joy in the Morning. It was a fateful decision. Once the Blitzkrieg began in May 1940, Wodehouse, who was 58, became involuntarily interned as an “enemy alien”.

Under the terms of the Geneva convention, he could not be released until he was 60. By August 1940, he had been dispatched to a Nazi internment camp, a converted lunatic asylum in Upper Silesia. This was a move that inspired one of his most famous lines. “If this is Upper Silesia, what must Lower Silesia be like?”

Meanwhile, in an elaborate and much-disputed series of moves, the Nazi propaganda machine was plotting to extract maximum publicity value from their celebrated prisoner. Wodehouse, virtually devoid of political savvy, was oblivious to this. His disgrace began in June 1941 when – in an act of insanity that was, he subsequently admitted, “a loony thing to do” – he agreed to make a series of broadcasts to America on German radio. It was largely innocent stuff: assurances to his US readers that he was alive and well, and some horribly ill-judged jokes about his experiences as an internee.

His timing could not have been worse. June 1941 was a low point in the Allies’ conduct of the war. The Nazis, with tank divisions storming across Soviet Russia, seemed on the brink of victory. Wodehouse’s “treachery” became the object of hysterical warmongering in the British media, led by an alliance of the Daily Mirror and the BBC. Trapped in Berlin, he was excoriated high and low, denounced in the Commons and branded a traitor. He – predictably – went to ground, licking his wounds, and only resurfaced in Paris after the liberation in 1944, when he turned himself over to the authorities.

Wodehouse was interrogated by journalist Malcolm Muggeridge and an MI5 barrister, found to be politically inept and guilty of “unwise” behaviour. An official report exonerated him of everything except stupidity. Inexcusably, the establishment never advised him of these findings, and he would be tormented by his tragic error for the next 30 years.

The mud, meanwhile, had stuck. If his second world war experience did not actually take away his life, his involuntary detention in Nazi Germany and its contentious aftermath wrecked it for ever. For the rest of his long career, he would be tarred with a variety of cruel and wholly inaccurate labels: “Nazi”, “collaborator”, “traitor”, “Goebbels’ stooge” and so on.

Hurt, puzzled and embarrassed, he went into exile in America, and died there, 30 years later, loved for his work, largely unknown for himself, imprisoned by his enemies in his wartime reputation, and by his fans in ecstatic and uncritical adulation.

Towards the end, there were some belated establishment moves – notably a knighthood – to signal official forgiveness. Wodehouse himself could never quite get over his disgrace and refused to consider returning home to the country he loved, despite unofficial overtures from, among others, the Queen Mother.

The British Library’s acquisition of his archive marks a milestone in the Wodehouse drama. British Library curator Kathryn Johnson, who has tracked these documents for more than a decade, told the Observer that “we are so glad that this priceless collection is now safely in public hands, where we can look after it for the nation”. Johnson sees this reconciliation as part of a larger re-evaluation of Wodehouse as a writer. “People are coming to acknowledge,” she says, “that he was a truly great English stylist.” Johnson recognises the aura of controversy that surrounds the Wodehouse name. “We will of course handle items like his wartime diary and the related correspondence with the greatest care and discretion,” she said.

Roly Keating, chief executive of the British Library, also salutes the timeliness of this move: “It’s right and proper that he’s taking his place alongside key contemporaries such as Kipling and Waugh – not to mention the greats of the literary canon.”

As usual with Wodehouse, professional decorum rarely survives an encounter with the infectious gaiety of his work. “On a completely personal note,” added Keating, “I’m thrilled that Wodehouse is joining the national collection. I’ve always loved the sheer distilled joy of his writing, and it’s wonderful to know that researchers will have such intimate access to his work process and private voice. Great comic writing always feels effortless, but archives like this expose what goes on behind the scenes.”

Wodehouse was a writer who loved to play with the English language in almost any register, so long as it was entertaining. For a writer, steeped in the English literary tradition, from Shakespeare to Gilbert & Sullivan, this move to the national library could scarcely be a sweeter kind of posthumous redemption.

Top 10 Wodehouse quotations

I’m not absolutely certain of the facts, but I rather fancy it’s Shakespeare who says that it’s always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping. Carry on, Jeeves

He spoke with a certain what-is-it in his voice, and I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled. The Code of the Woosters

She fitted into my biggest armchair as if it had been built round her by someone who knew they were wearing armchairs tight about the hips that season. My Man Jeeves

Sir Roderick Glossop is always called a nerve specialist, because it sounds better, but everybody knows that he’s really a sort of janitor to the looney-bin. The Inimitable Jeeves

It was my uncle George who discovered that alcohol was a food well in advance of medical thought. The Inimitable Jeeves

It’s no use telling me that there are bad aunts and good aunts. At the core, they are all alike. Sooner or later, out pops the cloven hoof. The Code of the Woosters

Into the face of the young man … who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French. The Luck of the Bodkins

It is a good rule in life never to apologise. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them. The Man Upstairs

The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun. The Adventures of Sally

As for Gussie Finknottle, many an experienced undertaker would have been deceived by his appearance and started embalming on sight. Right Ho, Jeeves

Whether you’re an experienced baker or a hungry novice, these stunning guides will have you whipping up sugary, decorated delicacies in no time—or simply cause guests to drool if you display these photo-heavy collections on the coffee table.

1. Better Baking by Genevieve Ko

In these ingenious recastings of favorite recipes like chocolate cake and rugelach, Ko uses whole grains instead of white flour and—when she can—­various oils in place of butter.

2. Butter Celebrates! by Rosie Daykin

Unlike Ko, Daykin believes in butter (and plenty of it) in these signature recipes from her Vancouver bakery, such as pistachio macaroons and sponge cake.

3. Dorie’s Cookies by Dorie Green

For those whose copies of Greenspan’s cookbook are dog-eared on the dessert pages, this cookie-only book is a treat.

4. Pâtisserie at Home by Mélanie Dupuis

This oversize book is stuffed with more than just recipes: It also features crisp infographics and scientific explanations for aspects of trickier pastries.

5. The Sprinkles Baking Book by Candace Nelson

Nelson, founder of the first cupcakes-­only bakery in the U.S. shares her delicious desserts, plus recipes from such stars as Blake Lively and Julia Roberts.

6. Marbled, Swirled, and ­Layered by Irvin Lin

Before you devour Lin’s bars and pies, be sure to pause and admire his artful frosting and beautifully scattered crumbles.

This story originally appears in the Nov. 25, 2016 issue of Entertainment Weekly. Pick it up on stands now or subscribe online at ew.com/allaccess.

America yes!

A little more than a month after Marvel announced a solo series for America Chavez at New York Comic Con, the company has finally revealed the series’ creative team.

As first reported by Refinery29, YA novelist Gabby Rivera (Juliet Takes a Breath) will write the series, while Joe Quinones (Howard the Duck) will serve as the series’ artist, and Maguerite Sauvage as cover artist. The new series will see the young hero face off against alien hordes and travel through different dimensions, while also trying to attend class on alternate Earths and make space for her personal life. 

“America doesn’t know how powerful she is, but she’s gonna find out. And the powers she does have are going to be expanded upon and she’s going to learn how to control and develop them,” says Rivera of what readers can expect from the upcoing series. “Some of the really fun Marvel moments are gonna be when we bring in key players like Captain America and Storm. They are going to be able to help America on her journey. And teach her things about her powers or lead her along the way.” 

Created by Joe Casey and Nick Dragotta, Chavez – a queer Latina raised in another dimension – first appeared in their 2011 series Vengeance. Since then, she has taken on the mantle of Miss America from Madeline Joyce, and gone on to earn herself a loyal fan following.

“America has one of the most dedicated and enthusiastic fanbases out there, so we wanted to make sure we could deliver a solo series worthy of that devotion,” says editor Will Moss. “That’s why we’re so thrilled to welcome Gabby Rivera to the Marvel fold, as she’s got America’s voice down pat, plus she’s got a ton of surprising and fun ideas for the series. And combining that with the one-of-a-kind stylings of the great Joe Quinones? Well, we’re ready to deliver that solo series now.”

Chavez was a member of Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s Young Avengers, and has appeared in G. Willow Wilson, Marguerite Bennett, and Jorge Molina’s A-Force series.

The solo series is a part of Marvel’s attempts to create a more inclusive roster of superheroes, which sees an African-American Iron Man, female Thor (Jane Foster), Asian Hulk (Amadeus Cho), and black-Hispanic Spider-Man (Miles Morales). 

America will be out March 2017.

View Quinones’ character design from the series, as well as Jamie McKelvie and Marguerite Sauvage’s variant covers (among others) of the series’ first issue, below. 

Earlier this year, fans finally got to see Batman and Wonder Woman meet on the big screen in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Unfortunately, two of the most popular small-screen versions of the iconic heroes (Adam West’s Batman and Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman) never got the opportunity. Now that both of those TV shows live on in modern homage comics (Batman ‘66 and Wonder Woman ‘77) DC is making up for lost time. The new digital-first crossover series, Batman ‘66 Meets Wonder Woman ‘77, brings the West and Carter version together in comic form, in a plot that spans from the ’40s all the way through the ’60s and ’70s settings of the respective TV shows, as the two heroes battle the immortal villain Ra’s al Ghul.

EW spoke to co-writers Jeff Parker and Marc Andreyko about what fans can expect from this long-awaited meeting. Check out a preview from the first issue below. Batman ‘66 Meets Wonder Woman ‘77 #1 will be available for download Wednesday via digital comics retailers, including the DC Comics App, DC Entertainment, iBooks, Comixology, Google Play, Kindle Store, Nook Store, and iVerse ComicsPlus.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: How did this crossover come about? It seems like a natural fit.
ANDREYKO: After reading Batman ‘66, I had approached DC [asking] why aren’t you guys doing Wonder Woman ‘77? Then we started doing the book, and I reached out to editors and said I’d really love to do a crossover. I had an idea for a basic plot, but I only want to do it if Jeff co-wrote it with me. Jeff really took the property of Batman ‘66 and captured the color, joy, fun without looking down his nose at it or making it snarky. He makes it look easy. Out of respect for what he’d done with the character, I asked if we could reach out to Jeff. Luckily he said he’d love to be part of it, and he’s been the co-captain with me.

How did you guys figure out the timing of the crossover? Batman is obviously set in the ‘60s, Wonder Woman in the ‘70s, and most of the first issue is set in flashback to the ‘40s, so it seems to hop all over the timeline.
ANDREYKO: My idea for it was, since the first season of Wonder Woman took place during World War II, and Batman was in ‘66, and then her second and third seasons took place in ‘77, why don’t we do all of them? Have a through-line story that starts in the ’40s with Wonder Woman and 10-year-old Bruce Wayne, then go to the ’60s when she’s back on Paradise Island, and then up into the ’70s where Wonder Woman’s where she is, and where is Batman? Find out where all those characters have ended up. Then it was just a matter of, who’d be a great villain? What kind of story do we have?

PARKER: Like he says, it worked really neatly with explaining or going along with how Wonder Woman did that season 2 switch. We treated it exactly like the way we treat Batman ‘66’s weird continuity, where we just roll with it. One of Mark’s best ideas has to do with who plays Catwoman in the series. I think that’s something that’s something people will find really fun as they get into it. Like here it’s one version of Catwoman, and then we switch it up, and never comment on it. It’s kind of meta.

Ra’s al Ghul is obviously a good villain for a time-hopping story, since he’s immortal. How did you go about introducing him and Talia to the Batman 66 universe?
ANDREYKO: One thing that changed the whole story for me was by having 10-year-old Bruce and Talia meet as little kids in the ‘40s story. There’s always been that connection with them in the mainstream comics, where they love each other but are nemeses at the same time, so having them be 10-year-olds puts a through-line and gives a level of emotional poignancy and spine to the story. While we’re having fun telling this story that crosses the eras and nostalgically mashes characters that we always wanted to see together, the story needs to have a heart or it’s just playing a video game. There’s a lot of poignancy in it that I didn’t really expect to come through.

PARKER: You don’t have to worry, are we gonna try and make some kind of romance bw him and WW, which we don’t, because the Talia connection is there. So Wonder Woman and Batman solely recognize each other as “ah, a crimefighter.” The highest level of recognition from Batman. So I’m glad we got to avoid a lot of cheesy stuff that could’ve been done.

It’s kind of weird that this ‘70s Batman villain has had such a modern resurgence. Now Ra’s al Ghul pops up everywhere, from the Christopher Nolan movies to Arrow. What do you think is attractive about him as a villain these days?
ANDREYKO: The idea of the Lazarus Pit is really interesting. He’s franchised those, so he has an organic reason to travel all over the world. The whole familial thing, “I’m an evil king and the daughter the princess loves my nemesis” – I mean that’s Shakespeare. They’re such grand gestures that can be done with him and because he’s immortal, you can have him be operatic and Shakespearean and it’s not silly, it’s where he comes from. He can legit speak about himself in the third person and not seem like a jerk.

PARKER: I like him as this rogue element that’s not necessarily good or bad. He’s fighting the Nazis too in the ‘40s story, even though he’s just as big a threat to everybody and young Bruce as they are. Nazis are taking over the world, but in his mind, it’s just something he has to sit out for awhile and it’ll all be gone, and he’ll still be doing his League of Shadows thing.

How would you describe the relationship between Batman and Wonder Woman?
PARKER: Batman kind of idolizes her.

ANDREYKO: He meets her at a very formative time of his life. We do stuff that ties in his origin into this stuff in interesting, Easter egg ways. But Bruce meets her when he’s 10 and she’s an adult, so he’s always looking up to her. She’s an inspiration to him. He respects her as a hero, and in the universe that we’re kind of establishing here, she’s the origin for when he does pick up the mantle, in an indirect way.

PARKER: Go back and look. Most of Batman’s villains and strong figures in the show were women. They had some pretty progressive attitudes in the middle of this campy show with all these jokes going on. So we’re kind of keeping that up.

These interpretations of the characters have fallen in and out of favor over the years. What do you guys like about writing these series, and why do you think they’re resonating right now with fans?
ANDREYKO: When it comes to Wonder Woman, Lynda’s performance has been the benchmark for 40 years. And now with her 75th anniversary and her appearance in Batman v Superman and her own movie coming up and the rise of the girl geek, we’re seeing there’s a need for this material. Batman’s one of the only characters in comics you can reinterpret in different ways. You can go from Christopher Nolan to Joel Schumacher to Tim Burton to Frank Miller to the Adam West TV show, and they all work. Now that geek culture commands culture, we need all these different permutations. I can give the Batman TV show DVDs to my 5-year-old nephew to watch, and then I can give Batman: The Animated Series to my 11-year old nephew to watch, and then when he’s older we can give them the Nolan movies. It’s nice to have these different versions of these characters so we can share with everyone, because they are our mythology and you don’t want anyone to be left out. There are so many different permutations of this character and they all work. That’s lightning in a bottle to be able to create a character you can do in any medium or any type of story, and none of it feels forced.

PARKER: That’s the key. There’s no right version, but there’s something consistent about all of them. The trick for us is not quite fan-service, but you are trying to give them something they wish they could’ve seen at a certain point. More importantly, you’re trying to surprise them with something they didn’t even know they wanted. It would be a huge mistake to troll forums and listen to people say “here’s what I want to see” and then write that down. That’s a bad idea, and it’s not what they want. They don’t want to see something just as they laid it out, you’ve got to bring something extra. Hopefully that’s what we’re doing.

ANDREYKO: We also have an unlimited production budget as far as special effects. We don’t have to worry about what’s gonna cost. We had some conversations between us and our editors where we realized, “That wouldn’t have been on the show, but it would’ve if they had the money.” If they had the money, they would’ve hired Ray Harryhausen and had some stop-motion stuff, so let’s put some of that in there. It’s a matter of making it faithful to the tone and world of the TV show, but also use the strengths of the medium we have, so we can do shots of Batman and Wonder Woman flying in their planes next to each other, talking to each other.

Jon Stewart left the Daily Show 15 months ago and the country hasn’t been the same since. Perhaps not since the golden age of Johnny Carson had one man so ruled the nexus of entertainment and current events, and Stewart’s reign as a pragmatic, progressive jester-in-chief helped plot the national conversation while simultaneously battering a series of political (mostly-conservative) blowhards that the host deemed representative of the “incestuous circle jerk of inoperable self-interest.”

In The Daily Show (The Book): An Oral History, New York Magazine writer Chris Smith digs deep into the show’s ascendance and cultural influence as if he was one of the show’s meticulous fact-checking news-tape researchers. Following the non-fiction technique popularized by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller (Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live), Smith lets the show’s stars, crew, and guests tell the show’s unvarnished history. Fortunately, most every one interviewed—from Stephen Colbert to longtime showrunner Ben Karlin to Sen. John McCain—possesses an A-plus wit.

Though the book carries the imprimatur of The Daily Show, including a foreword from Stewart himself, it doesn’t flinch from digging into the show’s most contentious moments and making the star himself slightly squirm. Several of Stewart’s biggest foils—including Tucker Carlson, Glenn Beck, and Jim Cramer—get to tell their sides of their stories, and Smith elicits pointed answers about the show’s behind-the-scenes drama, from the bumpy transition after Stewart replaced Craig Kilborn, to complaints that women weren’t always welcome by the staff’s boys-club, to the explosive 2011 racial argument that led to a rift between Stewart and Wyatt Cenac.

The Daily Show found its voice during the Bush years, especially in the aftermath of the administration’s reaction to the 9/11 terror attacks, and for half of America, Stewart spoke to the growing gap between America and its promise. (“The Bush presidency had been a great thing for us in terms of building our brand awareness,” said writing alum David Javerbaum. “Honestly, if Al Gore had been elected president, who knows what our show would’ve done.”)

It might seem early to lionize The Daily Show with a thick oral history. After all, the show’s still running and its DNA is sprinkled throughout late-night. But the timing is actually perfect. The memories, the laughter, and the wounds—they’re all still fresh, and the future will only diminish the staff’s he-said-she-said Rashomon recollections of backstage rivalries and corporate machinations. More importantly, in the Age of Trump, the time has never been better to delve into the minds of the masters who became a vital part of our democracy. Stewart is the craft’s Tom Joad, and wherever there’s a mountain of bulls—, he’ll be there. 

“Happiness can be found in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light,” as Albus Dumbledore once told young Harry Potter. Indeed, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series has been a source of solace for many readers in hard times. The latest example of that comes from Bana al-Abed, the seven-year-old Syrian girl who has been live-tweeting her experiences in the war-torn city of Aleppo. al-Abed (whose account is managed by her mother) recently tweeted that she had enjoyed a Harry Potter movie, and wanted to know how she could read the books, too. Rowling helped her out.

On Wednesday, al-Abed tweeted a cute message to Rowling thanking her for the book, and the author responded in kind. When a curious follower asked how she was able to deliver books to such a conflict-ridden city, Rowling responded simply: “ebooks.”

My friend @jk_rowling how are you? Thank you for the book, love you from #Aleppo. - Bana pic.twitter.com/c84b4Zux0G

— Bana Alabed (@AlabedBana) November 23, 2016

Love you too, Bana! Thinking of you, keep safe #Aleppo https://t.co/1l5SJPStEm

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) November 23, 2016

@ImNickySummer @AlabedBana Ebooks.

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) November 23, 2016

Many comic lovers dream of being able to write their own stories for their favorite superheroes. For Let’s Make a Deal co-hosts Wayne Brady and Jonathan Mangum, that dream has officially come true, with the pair co-writing a story for this year’s Amazing Spider-Man Annual, available for purchase today.

“On my checklist of ‘This is cool s— that would be awesome to do in your life,’ up at the top was definitely meeting Stan Lee, which I’ve gotten a chance to do and either being in a Marvel show or movie, or getting a chance to write a Marvel story,” says Brady, a lifelong comic fan.

Mangum and Brady’s comic writing debut sees them drawing on their own experiences as comedians and improvisers.

“’What if Spider-Man lost his funny mojo? Where would he go? How would he get it back?” says Brady of what fans can expect from their story. “Spidey is used to making things up on the fly. So he goes to Jonathan and myself to maybe take that to the next level. 

With Brady and Mangum swinging into comics writing, EW spoke to the duo about their favorite heroes, their experiences writing a Spider-Man annual, and who they’d like to write next. 

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: You guys are both comic book fans. Was Spider-Man always one of your favorite heroes?
JONATHAN MANGUM: Growing up [Spider-Man] would be one of the first ones you get exposed to. It’s Batman, Spider-Man, Superman, the trifecta of superheroes. Spiderman always had a sense of humor, which was always really cool to see. Batman could not tell a joke to save his damn life.
WAYNE BRADY: A lot of kids sync up with Spider-Man [because] unless you are the superstar jock in school, junior high and high school is not a cake walk for many of us. When you see Peter Parker, who is bulled in hallways, get power and actually do something about it, it strikes a cord. That’s something brilliant in the creation of Spider-Man. Spider-Man is the bullied kid who got a chance to stand up to the bully. As a kid I really, really liked Spider-Man because of that fact. While this kid was punching me in my stomach for my lunch outside the elementary school cafeteria, Spider-Man could wrap him up in webbing, hang him upside down, say something really funny, and embarrass him in front of everybody. It was a little bit of aspirational kid wish list in there too.

Everyone has something they want to see in a superhero story. What did you guys definitely want to write about when you first came on board?
BRADY: For something like the annual, which had to be a quick pop, the aim was that maybe [we] could have a fun story that was on topic with Spider-Man and on topic with my and Jonathan’s sensibilities. When we came up with the idea of Spider-Man taking an improv class that just seemed like a no brainer. It fits.
MANGUM: You can totally see Spider-Man signing up for an improv class. It just seems like something he’d do.
BRADY: Especially with improv being in the zeitgeist. This isn’t years and years ago when people didn’t know what improv was and it was relegated to a teeny, tiny, corner. Jonathan and I get a chance to do improv every day on Let’s Make a Deal, and then myself, and Jonathan as well, being on Whose Line for all these years. People are very familiar with the art form. It just makes sense that with Spidey mouthing off as much as he does that he would go to an improv class. It’s kind of an in-joke that’s an out joke to get to everybody else as well.

It’s funny that Spider-Man has definitely been saving the day enough that everyone kind of knows what his catchphrases or one-liners are, and are point out, “You’ve said this before.”
BRADY: That’s what happens to you in this day and age of social media. There is no mystery anymore. The fact that Spidey has been around and does his thing, it makes sense to us that the public would be at a certain point, that they’d turn comic-jaded. He has to get to up his funny game.

Considering that this the first time writing a comic for both of you, what was that experience like?
BRADY: It was actually fairly easy in the sense of we knew what the story was, then the rest was easy to follow. We just treated it like we were writing dialogue for a sketch or for a short movie. When you see it put up with the panels, that’s a completely different thing. Jonathan handled the dialogue duties. I did story work. Watching it develop bit by bit from [us saying] “Hey, what if he said this” to actually seeing a panel with Spider-Man saying those words was so cool.
MANGUM: Going from writing scripts to writing comics was different. If you’re writing a script you might say, “Spider-Man jumps to the ceiling, he lands on the floor, he takes the swing, and he dodges.” You don’t realize that’s four panels. You might write all that in one panel not realizing [that] there has to be one action per panel. It’s a little bit of a learning curve.

Now that both of you have written an Amazing Spider-Man comic, what other heroes would you guys want to write for?
BRADY: I’d love to take a crack at a Guardians of the Galaxy story. Star-Lord, especially the way he is written in the movie is just a ridiculously funny character. There’s a lot of room for humor, especially when the stakes are so high. They’re flying around chasing all manner of aliens and trying not to get killed. It reads like a very funny space opera. I’d love to get my hands on that. There was a [Marvel] series called, What If, [which was] basically alternate reality versions. Like “What if Rick Jones would’ve become the Incredible Hulk? I would love to do a What If story. That’s a title that is right up our alley in terms of being able to be funny and come up with a scaled version of what reality could be in the Marvel universe.
MANGUM: I always loved the Incredible Hulk as a character. You get this nerdy scientist who turns into this beast. Just the fact that he had so much intelligence to start with and then he gains this power, but loses [that intelligence].    

The Amazing Spider-Man Annual #1 is currently available for purchase in comic book stores and on Marvel.com.

Ever wondered if you could actually kill someone with molten gold? Or if dragons could be real? What about if you could have your very own pet dire wolf?

Those are just some of the questions author Helen Keen answers in her new book, The Science of Game of Thrones. 

Divided into three main parts (Fire, Ice and Magic), the book explores different facets of George R. R. Martin’s fictional world, with everything from Dothraki noun-verb constructs to the conditions required to smelt Valyrian steel. Keen looks for real world analogues to decipher some of the more supernatural occurrences in the Seven Kingdoms. 

EW caught up with Keen to talk dragons, dire wolves, and what other shows’ sciences she’d like to dig into next.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Were you always a Game of Thrones fan—did you read the books?
Yes. They’re huge books, and normally you’d go, “One of these will last me a whole winter.” But I was like, “No, I want to not do things. I want to go home in the evening and finish reading.” I think a lot of people talk about the books like that.

Did you become interested in the science of Game of Thrones while you were reading the books or watching the show?
The show. A lot of the people who work on the show really talk about how it was to get the dragons looking realistic [and] the way animals, lizards and even bats move. Obviously in order to make this beautiful fantasy world that looks really believable, you have to have so many elements from our world in it. [But] then you start thinking, “We don’t have any animals that breathe fire.” It’s this really cool trait that dragons have, but we don’t see that anywhere in the actual world. So where is that coming from? You just start having these questions and thinking about how much of this is possible.

How did you approach the research? Were you trying to watch the show and note what might have a basis in science?
I started by making a list of all the things that interested me in the show, like dire wolves. The La Brea Tar Pits are full of dire wolves [but] they’re not quite as huge as the ones in the book, which are about the size of ponies. Robb [Stark] is supposed to be riding into battle on the back of his. When you start looking at this stuff you think our world is a bit more fantastical than you thought as well. You escape into this fantasy world in Game of Thrones, but there’s also this element of actually weird and wonderful things in our world that you wouldn’t have necessarily known.

Like swords made out of meteorites. People actually did that.
Yes. The Egyptians. They didn’t have the technology to smelt iron and steel. They didn’t have furnaces to do that. They were like, “There’s this interesting stuff that keeps falling in the desert. Let’s use that.” Tutankhamen had all these things in his tomb made out of meteorite.

When you talked to scientists about the show, did you find that they are fact-checking it as they watch it?
Not so much. Some of them are, but I was asking people and saying, “If you’re watching this with your scientist hat on, how would you interpret this?” I was trying to find interesting questions to approach them with, see where that went. In the [most recent season] finale, there’s a massive explosion. We were watching the clip, and I was going, “At this point what’s going on here? This is a huge explosion, but is there really a substance we have in our world that’s the same as that?”

Was there anything you brought up where a scientist said, “There’s no real scientific basis here”?
Some of the stuff seems like it’s mostly magic. Like with the season change, George R. R. Martin says that’s kind of magic, but you [can] also say it’s about global warming, which isn’t magic. You can’t map an exact scientific explanation onto the phenomena on Game of Thrones but you can still find stuff that’s really interesting to use as a jumping off point.

Are there any other shows you’d like to delve into, science-wise?
Westworld raises lots of questions: Are computers self-aware? If we create this thing that looks like a human being, how should we treat it? What kind of rights should we give it? Not just science questions, but ethical ones. I think that stuff is pretty fascinating.

Sex can be notoriously tricky to write about—enough so that even seasoned authors can have a rough go of it.

But there is an upside to having crafted a poorly written sex scene: The Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

Established by literary critic Rhoda Koenig and Literary Review editor Auberon Waugh, the prize, given by the Literary Review, is awarded to an author who has penned a terribly written sex scene, in what is otherwise a pretty good novel.

While the magazine has picked some of its top contenders for the award, some of the nominees under consideration this year were Jonathan Safran Foer, Ian McEwan and Eimear McBride. The winner will be announced Nov. 30.  

Without further ado, here are this year’s contenders:

Ethan Canin’s A Doubter’s Almanac 

“The act itself was fervent. Like a brisk tennis game or a summer track meet, something performed in daylight between competitors. The cheap mattress bounced. She liked to do it more than once, and he was usually able to comply. Bourbon was his gasoline. Between sessions, he poured it at the counter while she lay panting on the sheets. Sweat burnished her body. The lean neck. The surprisingly full breasts. He would down another glass and return.”

Tom Connolly’s Men Like Air

“The walkway to the terminal was all carpet, no oxygen. Dilly bundled Finn into the first restroom on offer, locked the cubicle door and pulled at his leather belt. “You’re beautiful,” she told him, going down on to her haunches and unzipping him. He watched her passport rise gradually out of the back pocket of her jeans in time with the rhythmic bobbing of her buttocks as she sucked him. He arched over her back and took hold of the passport before it landed on the pimpled floor. Despite the immediate circumstances, human nature obliged him to take a look at her passport photo.”

Erri De Luca’s The Day Before Happiness

“She pushed on my hips, an order that thrust me in. I entered her. Not only my prick, but the whole of me entered her, into her guts, into her darkness, eyes wide open, seeing nothing. My whole body had gone inside her. I went in with her thrusts and stayed still. While I got used to the quiet and the pulsing of my blood in my ears and nose, she pushed me out a little, then in again. She did it again and again, holding me with force and moving me to the rhythm of the surf. She wiggled her breasts beneath my hands and intensified the pushing. I went in up to my groin and came out almost entirely. My body was her gearstick.”

Janet Ellis’ The Butcher’s Hook

“When his hand goes to my breasts, my feet are envious. I slide my hands down his back, all along his spine, rutted with bone like mud ridges in a dry field, to the audacious swell below. His finger is inside me, his thumb circling, and I spill like grain from a bucket. He is panting, still running his race. I laugh at the incongruous size of him, sticking to his stomach and escaping from the springing hair below.”

Gayle Forman’s Leave Me 

Once they were in that room, Jason had slammed the door and devoured her with his mouth, his hands, which were everywhere. As if he were ravenous.

And she remembered standing in front of him, her dress a puddle on the floor, and how she’d started to shake, her knees knocking together, like she was a virgin, like this was the first time. Because had she allowed herself to hope, this was what she would’ve hoped for. And now here it was. And that was terrifying.

Jason had taken her hand and placed it over his bare chest, to his heart, which was pounding wildly, in tandem with hers. She’d thought he was just excited, turned on.

It had not occurred to her that he might be terrified, too.

Robert Seethaler’s The Tobacconist

“He closed his eyes and heard himself make a gurgling sound. And as his trousers slipped down his legs all the burdens of his life to date seemed to fall away from him; he tipped back his head and faced up into the darkness beneath the ceiling, and for one blessed moment he felt as if he could understand the things of this world in all their immeasurable beauty. How strange they are, he thought, life and all of these things. Then he felt Anezka slide down before him to the floor, felt her hands grab his naked buttocks and draw him to her. “Come, sonny boy!” he heard her whisper, and with a smile he let go.”

The winner of the Bad Sex in Fiction Award will be announced Wednesday, Nov. 30.

Star Wars fans are likely to have as curious and strained a relationship with Carrie Fisher’s The Princess Diarist as the actress has with the films: a hope for something deeper, disappointment in its glibness, and ultimately a respect and grudging appreciation for the sincere emotion it represents. Fisher delves into the making of the original 1977 Star Wars, spurred in part by a collection of handwritten diaries she says she recently found from that time, but stops with the original—she doesn’t touch the sequels or The Force Awakens—and spends most of the book ruminating on an affair she says she had with her married and much older costar, Harrison Ford, who was then 33. At the time she was the insecure 19-year-old daughter of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher who had stumbled into the family business of entertainment because she didn’t know what else she wanted. Forty years later, she still seems to be grappling with that feeling, embracing what Princess Leia has done for her career and celebrating the character’s inspiring place in the pantheon of female heroes while recoiling from Leia’s sex-symbol status as a pubescent touchstone (pun intended) for male fans.

The Princess Diarist reads like a YA novel featuring the leads of Star Wars as its main characters. First-person narrator Fisher is talented and clever but terminally self-conscious. She falls for Ford, the charismatic but emotionally distant bad boy of the school play, who doesn’t really care for her and has a way of making her feel conflicting things about herself. Leia is so shrewd, fearless, and forever young that she makes Fisher seem like her own shadow. There isn’t a lot of insight into the character or the creation of a movie that means so much to so many, but there’s tremendous insight into the volatile heart of a young woman, seen through the eyes of her wiser, older self still seeking her place in the universe.

Civil-rights campaigner and congressman John Lewis was in tears as he accepted America’s National Book award for young people’s literature in Manhattan on Wednesday night, speaking of how as a child he had been turned away from the public library for being black.

Lewis won the prestigious US honour for the third volume of his graphic memoir March, which tells of his vital part in the civil rights movement in the 1960s. “This is unreal. This is unbelievable,” said Lewis as he took to the stage with his visibly moved co-authors Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell.

Recounting how he grew up “very, very poor” in rural Alabama, Lewis said there were “very few books in our home”, recalling a trip in 1956 to try and borrow some books from the library.

“I had a wonderful teacher in elementary school who told me: ‘Read, my child, read’, and I tried to read everything. I love books,” said Lewis. “When I was 16 years old, some of my brothers and sisters and cousins [were] going down to the public library trying to get public library cards, and we were told the library was for whites only, not for coloureds. To come here and receive this award this honour is too much. Thank you.”

Lewis has previously described March as a book “for all of America”, but in particular for young people, “to understand the essence of the civil rights movement, to walk through the pages of history to learn about the philosophy and discipline of nonviolence, to be inspired to stand up to speak out and to find a way to get in the way when they see something that is not right, not fair, not just”.

During an evening when the spectre of Donald Trump’s presidency reared its head on numerous occasions, Ibram X Kendi, winner of the nonfiction prize for his history of racism in America, Stamped from the Beginning, spoke in his acceptance speech of his six-month-old daughter Imani. “In Swahili it means faith,” said the author. “Her name, of course, has a new meaning for us as the first black president is set to leave the White House, and as a man who has been emphatically endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan is about to enter.”

Kendi dedicated his award to those “who have dedicated their live to anti-racist work” and said he “never lost faith” in America’s capacity to end racism while researching his book.

“I never lost faith, because for every racist idea there was an anti-racist idea,” said the author. “For every killer of the mind there was a lifesaver of the mind. And in the midst of the human ugliness of racism there is the human beauty in the resistance to racism. That is why I have faith. And I’ll never lose my faith that you and I can create an anti-racist America ... where black lives matter.”

The poetry award went to The Performance of Becoming Human by Daniel Borzutzky.

Novelist Colson Whitehead won the National Book award for fiction for his novel The Underground Railway, about a slave who escapes from a cotton plantation in Georgia. In her review for the Guardian, author Cynthia Bond said: “This uncanny novel never attempts to deliver a message – instead it tells one of the most compelling stories I have ever read.”

Whitehead said, on accepting his prize: “Outside is the blasted hellhole wasteland of Trumpland,” advising his audience that in response to Trump “a good formula, for me anyway”, was to “be kind to everybody, make art and fight the power”.