Last weekend in Queens, the group Slightly Altered States put together a marathon, 24-hour reading of The Mueller Report. Filibustered and Unfiltered started on Saturday at 8pm in Long Island City and included more than 100 paricipants, including the performer Taylor Mac.
Clay Smith is leaving his post as editor-in-chief of the Kirkus book review to work full-time on the San Antonio Book Festival. Tom Beer, who was formerly the books editor at Bloomberg News and is currently the books editor at Newsday, has been named the new editor-in-chief at Kirkus, and will start on June 17.
Turkish novelist Elif Shafak is calling out to writers across the world to help support writers, publishers, and academics in her country. There has been a wave of arrests of writers and publishers in Turkey, and prosecutors recently announced their plans to review Shafak’s novels as well. “Turkey today is the world’s leading jailer of journalists,” she said. “It’s also very tough for academics. Thousands of people have lost their jobs just for signing a peace petition.”
Bob Morris, the former Sunday Styles columnist at the New York Times and the author of the memoir Assisted Loving: True Tales of Double Dating with My Dad, is running for mayor in Belport, Long Island. According to the New York Post, Morris is running on a platform that includes “reducing the greenhead fly population,” building a community pool, increased recycling, and lowering leaf-blower noise. Ira Silverberg, Morris’s husband and a former editor (Simon and Schuster, Grove) and literary agent (Sterling and Lord), writes that Morris is “looking toward maintaining small town tradition while embracing 21st century values and change.”
This year’s Book Expo America, which took place last week, was beset by bad weather, and many commented on the fact that the exhibition floor has shrunk, compared to previous years. But according to Publisher’s Weekly, a number of books due out this fall and winter (by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Margaret Atwood, Laura Prescott) leant the convention a palpable air of excitement.
