Members of the Folio Academy are calling on the Man Booker organization to stop including American writers in the competition. 2005 Booker winner John Banville said that while he had been in favor of the 2014 rule change, he now has a different opinion. “The prize was unique in its original form, but has lost that uniqueness. It is now just another prize among prizes,” he explained. “I am convinced the administrators should take the bold step of conceding the change was wrong, and revert.”
Amazon is reportedly spending $1 billion develop Liu Cixin’s sci-fi book series The Three-Body Problem into a multi-season show as part of their “quest to best HBO by creating a show even bigger than Game of Thrones.” “That may be a drop in the bucket compared to Jeff Bezos’s net worth,” Yohana Desta notes, “but it’s also a hefty enough sum to make this potential adaptation one of the most expensive shows of all time—and that’s before production even begins.”
Radhika Jones has made a number of new hires at Vanity Fair. Sticky Fingers author Joe Hagan will serve as special correspondent, while Variety’s Sonia Saraiya and Stealing the Show author Joy Press will cover TV.
Game Change director Jay Roach is directing and producing HBO’s Fire and Fury adaptation.
Playboy has decided to leave Facebook. In an announcement on instagram, chief creative officer Cooper Hefner explained that the decision was motivated not only by the platform’s “sexually repressive” environment, but by their “recent meddling in a free U.S. election,” which “demonstrates another concern we have of how they handle users' data—more than 25 million of which are Playboy fans.”
