Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of the New York Times, is continuing to do damage control following allegations that parts of her new book, Merchants of Truth, are plagiarized. “All of the allegations that I lifted material or plagiarized—that’s not true, but I did make mistakes in the footnotes, and there are some uncited passages,” Abramson told Vox’s Sean Illing. “Those sources are credited in other footnotes; it’s just those specific quotes are not, and that’s an error and it will be fixed pronto.” When Illing pointed out that at least one article—a Jake Malooley piece about Vice, which appeared in Time Out—wasn’t cited at all, Abramson stated: “Yeah, I can’t find that Malooley citation in the book. But it should be in there, and I can’t find it. But we will get it corrected pronto.”
Little, Brown has bought Malcolm Gladwell’s next book, Talking to Strangers, which is scheduled to be published in September. Talking to Strangers, Gladwell’s first book since his 2013 David and Goliath (also Little, Brown), argues that there is “something very wrong with the tools and strategies we use to make sense of people we don’t know,” and shows how the inability to talk with strangers is “inviting conflict and misunderstanding in ways that have a profound effect on our lives and our world.”
PEN America will honor the Mexican-American novelist and essayist Sandra Cisneros—author of The House on Mango Street, among other books—with the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature at its 2019 awards ceremony, which will take place on February 26.
According to Richard Johnson at Page Six, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump are “bracing” themselves as they wait for the publication of investigative journalist Vicky Ward’s Kushner Inc.: Greed, Ambition, Corruption, which will be released by St. Martin’s on March 19. The book will “delve into the sordid case that got Jared’s father, real-estate developer Charles Kushner, a two-year prison sentence for witness tampering and other charges after Charles set a honey trap for his brother-in-law using a prostitute.” Ward’s 2014 book The Liar’s Ball exposed the brutal business tactics of various real-estate tycoons, including Donald Trump.
Teju Cole’s latest On Photography column will be his last. In “When the Camera Is a Weapon of Imperialism,” the Open City author dwells on Rev. R.H. Stone’s memoir In Africa’s Forest and Jungle: Or Six Years Among the Yorubans, and reflects on how images of human suffering doesn’t only stir a viewer’s conscience, but also “implicitly serves the powers that be.”
