Bleacher Report and Bustle founder Bryan Goldberg bought Gawker at auction yesterday for $1.13 million. The deal will be approved by a bankruptcy judge on Tuesday. “We have no immediate plans to re-launch Gawker,” Goldberg wrote in an email obtained by CNN after the sale. “For now, things will stay as they are. I'm very excited about the possibilities for the future of Gawker.”
Granta Books is publishing a memoir by Turkish novelist and journalist Ahmet Altan, who is currently serving a life sentence in prison after being arrested in September 2016 in a government round-up of intellectuals and journalists. I Will Never See the World Again will be published in March 2019.
In Sweden, the New Academy has announced their “long-ish longlist” for their alternative to the Nobel prize.
The Guardian has obtained a leaked copy of Sean Spicer’s upcoming book, The Briefing: Politics, the Press and the President. Besides confirming Paul Manafort’s major role in the Trump campaign, Spicer also praises Trump as “a unicorn, riding a unicorn over a rainbow,” and “compares the work of a press secretary to that of a fighter jet pilot, champion boxer and tightrope artist.” The Briefing will be published July 24. Tickets for the book’s launch party on the same day are selling for as much as $1,000, Esquire reports.
At Lithub, Rachel Vorona Cote wonders if Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale wants viewers to empathize with Ivanka Trump.
Jacob Rubin explains how Mary Gaitskill’s novel Veronica helped him return to reading fiction, after the death of a friend made both reading and writing it unbearable. “In those weeks after Nick’s death I planned to volunteer to sit with dying people. Such work at the time, as opposed to writing, seemed undoubtedly meaningful,” he writes. “But after reading Veronica, I began to understand that this new ambition was at least in part a metaphor: In my vision of hospice work, I was imagining a space in which our ephemerality is at last undeniable, one in which we are finally permitted our ugliness because it is written on our faces, a room in which we are allowed fully to live and die. Mary Gaitskill reminded me that art can provide such a space.”
