Joe Klein has asked us to accept Brian Williams’s apology, saying that pundits demanding his dismissal are “self-righteous and gagging.” Klein comes at the topic from a unique perspective, having been criticized for his early denials that he was the anonymous author behind the bestselling campaign roman-a-clef Primary Colors.
The Maryland Court of Special Appeals has agreed to reopen the appeal of Adnan Syed, whose murder conviction was the subject of the hit podcast Serial. Last week, Sarah Koenig discussed podcasts at a New School roundtable moderated by the New York Times’s David Carr. (Carr leads off with the question: “Do you think podcasting is the best thing that ever happened to public radio or the worst?”)
Grove Press has partnered with the online publisher Electric Literature to create the Literary Hub, which will organize literary content from a number of sources (and publish some original content too). “We need a go-to site for literary culture, but no one can create it alone,” notes Morgan Entrekin, President and Publisher of Grove Atlantic. The website’s staff will include editor in chief Jonny Diamond and executive editor John Freeman, and confirmed partners include Bomb, the Paris Review, Knopf, FSG, and City Lights. The site will launch on April 8 at the AWP conference.
Book deals this week: PW reports that former Simon & Schuster EIC Michael Korda has sold Alone, his new work of nonfiction about European politics in 1940, to Liveright; Ebola survivor Kent Brantly has sold a memoir to Penguin Random House’s WaterBrook Multnomah imprint; and novelist and editor Ed Park has purchased author Shawn Vestal’s debut novel, Daredevils, for Penguin Press.
Arthur Bradford published his story collection Dogwalker in 2001 to much acclaim, winning the praise of, among others, David Foster Wallace and J. T. Leroy (whoever that was). Now, as his second book, Turtle Face, is about to come out, the author answers the question: What have you been doing for the past fourteen years?
