Amitava Kumar, whose novel A Time Outside This Time will be published in October, ponders Spike Lee, tennis, Nabokov, and much more, including the “arresting” quality he sought when he started writing fiction: “Plots are for dead people, but voice—oh, voice is how you know you’re alive.”
Zando, the independent press that “connects inspiring authors to the audiences they deserve,” is continuing to build its team, hiring Chloe Texier-Rose (formerly of Farrar, Straus and Giroux) to head its publicity department. In a statement released by Zando, Texier-Rose says: “As a book publicist, my goal is to tell stories about our books that place them within a larger cultural and global narrative, and with Zando, I believe we have an incredible opportunity to expand the ways in which we tell those stories.”
Using data collected by Book Marks, LitHub is calling Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You “the most reviewed book of all time” (or at least of recent time).
Podcaster and author Zibby Owens and memoirist and editor Leigh Newman have announced the launch of Zibby Books, which will publish twelve titles a year. Owens, who has interviewed more than a thousand author for her podcast Moms Don’t Have Time to Read, wants to rethink the influencer model: “Instead of relying on celebrities to promote books, Zibby is calling on other bestselling and established authors to give back and lift up individual titles from inception to publication,” says a press release from the new company. “Dubbed ‘Book Champions,’ those bestselling authors will get an equity stake in their Zibby Book and mentor the author along the way.”
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, author of the bestselling The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois, has sold an essay collection and a short story collection to Harper. According to the publisher, the essay collection, titled Misbehaving at the Crossroads, looks at “the intersection of feminism and Blackness in America since 1619” and is “infused with history, criticism, and stories from the author’s own life.” The story collection, A Simple, Promised Land, presents “the daily lives and dramas” of characters living in the fictional town of Chicasetta, Georgia.
On Wednesday at 7:30pm Eastern time, Gary Indiana, Donald Nicholson-Smith, Luc Sante, and Alyson Waters will discuss the work of French crime novelist Jean-Patrick Manchette.
