Jacqueline Woodson talks to Entertainment Weekly about her new two-book deal with Riverhead. Woodson’s last book, Another Brooklyn, was her first work of adult fiction in twenty years. “I think it’s much harder to write for young people than it is to write for adults,” she said. “You have to go back to that place of being a young person yourself and so many adults have either deliberately forgotten that place (probably because it was too painful a time to hold onto) or they just can’t access it.”
The Guardianspeculates on who might be in the running for the next editor of Vanity Fair. Two months after Graydon Carter resigned, the magazine has yet to announce his replacement.
Little, Brown editor Tracy Behar is starting her own imprint with the publisher. Behar’s still-unnamed imprint will launch next year and focus on health, psychology, and science.
Kristopher Jansma looks at Clarice Lispector’s final novel, A Breath of Life, which was published after her death and assembled by the late author’s friend and assistant, Olga Borelli. Hired by Lispector after a fire destroyed all of the author’s unfinished work, Borelli “dedicated her life to the remainder of Lispector’s,” Jansma writes. “She cared for her, talked with her, comforted her, and played a singular hand in the construction of her late works, editing and arranging them from disparate fragments.”
Hamilton Fish, publisher of the New Republic, is taking a leave of absence after a number of female employees reported that Fish “created an uncomfortable environment for them,” according to a letter from owner Win McCormack.
Nick Denton reflects on the impact of Gawker’s early reporting on rumors and gossip about sexual harassment in the media and entertainment industries—including on Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein, among others—and how those posts paved the way for outlets like the New York Times and the New Yorker. “Those first accounts of sexual harassment — even if anonymous or thinly sourced — give confidence to victims that they are not alone,” he writes. “Gossip, though it draws those motivated by envy and resentment, is also a tool of the powerless.”