Michael Wolff has reportedly signed a contract with Henry Holt to write a sequel to his bestselling portrait of the Trump Administration, Fire and Fury.
Knopf has paid a reported $2 million for the North American rights to Lara Prescott’s debut novel, We Were Never Here. Prescott’s book is a fictional account of the making of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, a novel that was banned and suppressed in the Soviet Union, and that might never have become known to the world had it not been successfully smuggled out of the country and translated by the CIA.
David Hadju, author of the critical study Positively Fourth Street (in part about Bob Dylan), has sold his first graphic book to Columbia University Press. According to Hadju’s agent, Chris Calhoun, Hadju’s A Revolution in Three Acts is “a historical story of three ‘wildly transgressive’ stars of the Vaudeville stage: Bert Williams, the African-American minstrel performer; Eva Tanguay, the ‘I Don’t Care’ girl; and Julian Eltinge, a female impersonator.”
Remembering Anthony Bourdain: Here is his list of “39 books to ‘unfuck yourself.’” Also, Dreaming the Beatles author Rob Sheffield pays tribute to the notoriously prickly celebrity chef: “He made it easy for the rest of us to live vicariously through his adventures, because he seemed to have a boundless appetite for life.”
The novelist and cultural critic Marian Warner—a novelist and critic who won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Stranger Magic, her study of the Arabian Nights—recently warned against what she sees as a new tendency to reward authors for being “virtuous.” “Striving to be good is not the same as good writing,” she stated in her presidential address at the Royal Society of Literature. “Engaging in fictive truth-telling is not the same as winning gold stars for conduct.”
Tonight in New York, Bad Feminist author Roxane Gay will discuss the new anthology Not that Bad: Dispatches from the Rape Culture, which she edited, with Aja Monet, author of My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter. Tomorrow, Gay will discuss the book with contributor Ally Sheedy.