I don’t know how I missed this, but two days ago Joan Didion won the National Book Award. The judges called The Year of Magical Thinking “a masterpiece in two genres: memoir and investigative journalism.” Their full statement (and an ectoplasmic picture of Didion) can be found here.

In case you missed it, a couple writers (Charles D’Ambrosio, David Rakoff, Emilys Hall and White, and others) weighed in on the books page a couple weeks ago about what of their own writing they’ve stolen from Didion, whom I would argue is greatest American essayist of the last half-century.