Liz Phair, the musician who brought us the indie-rock classic Exile in Guyville, has signed a two-book deal with Random House. The first book, a memoir titled Horror Stories, will apparently detail her “experiences with fame, heartbreak, motherhood, and everything in between.”
Garth Risk Hallberg, the author of City on Fire and a self-identified “unreconstructed geek,” explains how and why he updated his debut novella, A Guide to the North American Family, which is being released in a new edition by Knopf.
The Meredith Corporation is currently in discussions over the purchase of Time Inc—the publisher that owns Time, Sports Illustrated, and numerous other periodicals—and the influential conservatives Charles and David Koch have “tentatively agreed to back” the deal. In the New York Times, one associate of the brothers notes: “Knowing the Kochs, I think they’d have to see it as a business that could at the same time further their political interests.”
Shannon Michael Kane, who in 2013 took over and revitalized the Printed Matter Book Fair, has died.
“The idea that I love is that a story is kind of a black box, and you’re going to put the reader in there, she’s going to spend some time with this thing that you have made, and when she comes out, what going to have happened to her in there is something kind of astonishing. It feels like a curtain has been pulled back and she’s gotten a glimpse into a deeper truth.” In a short video, George Saunders describes what makes stories bad (they condescend), and what good stories do for us.
In a short roundup titled “3 Books that Help Make Sense of Climate Change,” the New York Times includes Nigel Lawson’s An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming. Lawson’s book approaches climate change with skepticism, and some critics are charging that the Times was careless to suggest that it “makes sense” of the topic.