Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, and others give tips on “how to write a Booker contender.”
Last Thursday, a number of European publishers became concerned after reading that the Trump administration’s new tariffs on products from the European Union will be applied to books published in the UK and Germany. But as Ray Ambriano of Meadows Wye & Co., a logistics company specializing in the publishing industry, has pointed out, according to the official language of the new tariffs, bound books will not be affected.
Last night, Trump praised journalist and author Bob Woodward for his appearance on Face the Nation (which the president called “Deface the Nation”). Woodward, who helped break the Watergate story and co-authored All the President’s Men, appeared on the show to talk about how the current impeachment hearings compare with those of the past. Trump failed to mention Woodward’s book Fear: Trump in the White House, which “portrays a White House with relentless infighting and a work culture so toxic and volatile that many of President Trump’s top advisers and cabinet members became accustomed to working around their boss, whom they described as unstable and uninformed.” Immediately after publication, Trump said that book had already been “discredited,” and also: “It’s just another bad book. He’s had a lot of credibility problems.” (In other Bob Woodward news, the veteran reporter enraged many audience members at a book event last week, during which he “repeatedly interrupted” authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey as they discussed their new book She Said. “On the topic of Weinstein, Woodward was said to prefer to focus on the disgraced movie mogul’s motives rather what his alleged victims endured.”)
Book deals: Bill Gates has sold a book on climate change to Doubleday. Bloomberg reporter Peter Robison has sold Flying Bird, an investigative report of Boeing and the behind-the-scenes decisions that led to crashes involving the company’s 737 Max jets, to Doubleday. Kristen Arnett, a fiction writer who has published a book with indie press Tin House, has sold Samson—a novel about “motherhood, expectations, and toxic masculinity within a queer household”—and a story collection to Riverhead in a six-figure deal.
What would Norman Mailer be writing if he were still alive? “There would have been a Trump novel—you could have bet on it,” writes Thomas Meaney. “The spectacle of celebrity entertainment come home to rot was prime Mailer territory.”
