paper trail

Jose Antonio Vargas to publish new book with Pantheon

Jose Antonio Vargas. Photo: Gerald Salva Cruz

At Publishers Weekly, Shelly Romero and Adriana M. Martínez Figueroa revisit James Ledbetter’s “The Unbearable Whiteness of Publishing,” a two-part feature that ran in the Village Voice in 1995. “Over the past quarter-century, book publishing has made some strides in diversifying its workforce and the authors it publishes, thanks in part to the efforts of many recently founded advocacy groups and movements, including We Need Diverse Books, People of Color in Publishing, and the #OwnVoices movement,” Romero and Martínez Figueroa write. And yet: “The parallels between publishing in 1995 and publishing today are astounding, unsurprising, and disheartening. In fact, the main threads of Ledbetter’s story could very well have been plucked from any recent discussion surrounding publishing’s lack of racial and ethnic diversity today.”

At LitHub, Paul Yamazaki reflects on the fifty years he’s spent working at City Lights bookstore.

To meet “overwhelming demand” for the work of Amanda Gorman, Penguin Random House has announced that it plans an initial printing of one million copies of all three of the poet’s forthcoming books.

Book deals: Pulitzer-winner Lawrence Wright (The Looming Tower, Going Clear) has sold his book on COVID-19, titled The Plague Year, to Knopf; it will be released on June 8…. Little, Brown has purchased Malcolm Gladwell’s The Bomber Mafia, which “delves deep into questions of how technology and best intentions collide in the heat of war”; it is set for publication in April…. Farrar, Straus and Giroux has bought lawyer Will Jawando’s My Black Fathers, “an inspiring book about fathers and sons, Black masculinity, and the transformative power of mentors in the life of a young Black man”; it will be published in the spring of 2022…. And at Pantheon, Lisa Lucas has made her first purchase as publisher, buying Jose Antonio Vargas’s White Is Not a Country, which “will explore race and identities like his—neither Black nor white—through historical research, interviews, reportage and analysis.”

The Guardian has posted a roundup of the best new debuts coming out in Britain this year.

Tomorrow (Tuesday), in a virtual event that begins at 7 PM EST, Emily Gould will talk with Lauren Oyler about her new novel, Fake Accounts.