Ira Silverberg—who has been the editor in chief of Grove Press, an agent at Donadio & Olson and at Sterling Lord Literistic, and the Literature Director of the National Endowment of for the Arts—has started a new position as senior editor at Simon & Schuster.
In a new essay, author Jedediah Purdy dwells on the similarities between Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me and Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels: “They are representative work for a time when representation—politically, aesthetically—is at its most fraught, in speaking for others and also in putting forward one’s self.”
When a journalist recently asked Patti Smith, whose new memoir, M Train, was published last week, if she’s single, the singer-writer responded: “I don’t think that’s any of your business.”
Discussing the mass shooting in Oregon last week, a Fox News correspondent pondered the suspect’s name, Chris Harper Mercer, and claimed: “I mean, his name doesn’t bring anything to mind, where he be—he doesn’t sound like he’s Muslim.” This, says the Washington Post, points to another reason that media outlets should name the killer: “It may serve to expose certain presumptions and prejudices.” At Poynter, Kelly McBride agrees that it’s important to name the shooter, and offers a list of reasons that journalists should do so. The Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting site remains skeptical, saying that media coverage of such shootings is “a sort of advertisement to mass murder.”
The online betting site Ladbrokes has given Haruki Murakami 6-1 odds to win the Nobel Prize for Literature this year, which puts him slightly behind the frontrunner, Svetlana Alexievich, who has been given 5-1 odds. Alexievich is from Belarus, and is best known in the US for her oral history Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, which was translated by Keith Gessen.
At the Daily Beast, Lloyd Grove says that Josh Tyrangiel’s departure as editor in chief of Bloomberg Businessweek and as chief content officer of Bloomberg Media is evidence that former mayor Michael Bloomberg is “reasserting total control over his privately held empire.”