Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan announced her next novel today. Manhattan Beach follows Anna Kerrigan, “the Brooklyn Navy Yard’s only female driver,” and her mafia-boss father during World War II. The book will be published by Scribner in October.
Fox News anchor Heather Nauert has been named State Department spokeswoman, becoming the second staffer from the network to be hired at the agency. Nauert was most recently on Fox & Friends, a “program that is one of Trump’s favorites.”
The Huffington Post looks into The Camp of the Saints, the 1973 French novel often referred to by Steve Bannon during discussions on immigration. A “cult favorite on the far right,” the book tells the story of refugees who arrive in France by boat and the “defenders of the white christian supremacy” that attempt to keep them out. When the book was released in the US in 1975, one Kirkus Review wrote, “The publishers are presenting The Camp of the Saints as a major event, and it probably is, in much the same sense that Mein Kampf was a major event.”
Liz Spayd examines the gender disparities in the New York Times’s newsroom. Spayd writes that “women have skidded down the power structure since Jill Abramson was dismissed as executive editor three years ago.” Although multiple women were recently added to the masthead, Spayd notes that men make up the top leadership of the paper, and outnumber women as reporters and columnists. Spayd concludes that “if more seats are to be taken up by women . . . it will be up to men to make that happen. They are, after all, the ones with the power to do so.”
The Guardian talks to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie about feminism, raising her daughter between two countries, and her new book, Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions. Adichie responded to charges that a previous collaboration with Christian Dior on t-shirts that read “We should all be feminists” went against feminist ideology. “The creative director of Christian Dior is obviously a woman of some privilege. But does it then mean that she doesn’t have gender-based problems in her life? Because she does” Adichie said. “Was it going to make the world a better place? No. But I think there’s a level of consciousness-raising and a level of subversion that I like.” Adichie also says that the idea of using feminism as “a marketing ploy” is amusing to her. “Sorry. Feminism is not that hot,” she said. “I can tell you I would sell more books in Nigeria if I stopped and said I’m no longer a feminist.”
Tonight at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York, WNYC’s Brian Lehrer hosts a panel on immigration in Trump’s America.