Joe Klein weighs in on Carlos Lozada’s new book, What We Were Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era. “In 2015, Carlos Lozada, the Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book critic, took on a harrowing task: He read eight books ‘written’ by Donald Trump. Soon, he expanded the mandate, reading everything he could about Trump and the Trump era—150 books in all. It was an act of transcendent masochism, but we should be grateful he did it because What Were We Thinking looks past the obvious and perverse—that is, past Trump himself—to the troublesome questions raised by the elevation of a soulless carnival barker to the nation’s highest office.”
Knopf has announced that it will publish Ethan Hawke’s new novel, about an actor whose marriage is coming apart, in February. According to Jordan Pavlin, Senior Vice President and Editorial Director at Knopf, A Bright Ray of Darkness “is a novel soaked in rage and sex and longing and despair, a ferociously intelligent evisceration of fame and celebrity, and a transfixing backstage glimpse into the magic of New York theater.”
Norton/Liveright publicist Peter Miller discusses his work with Books Through Bars, an organization that donates books to prisoners throughout the US.
The New York Review of Books has purchased a 9,000-square-foot office townhouse on East 32nd Street. The Beaux-Arts building was built in 1902, and was previously owned by Milton Glaser, who created the iconic “I heart NY” logo, and was from 1968 until 1975 the office of New York magazine, which Glaser founded with Clay Felker.
Simon Reynolds, author of Rip It Up and Start Again and Generation Ecstasy, writes about the expanded-edition reissue of Prince’s Sign O’ the Times.
On Thursday at 7 PM eastern time, NYPL Live will host a virtual event titled “Political Roundtable with The New York Review of Books,” which will “examine and debate our moment of political division and crisis.” Participants include: Jamelle Bouie, opinion columnist at the New York Times; Pamela Karlan, co-director of the Stanford University Supreme Court Litigation Clinic; Mark Lilla, Professor of Humanities at Columbia University; Timothy Snyder, Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University; and Brenda Wineapple, writer, literary critic, and essayist. You can register to attend here.
