The Man Booker International Prize shortlist was announced yesterday. Mathias Enard’s Compass, David Grossman’s A Horse Walks Into a Bar, Roy Jacobsen’s The Unseen, Dorthe Nors’s Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, Amos Oz’s Judas, and Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream are all finalists for the award. The winner will be announced in June.
HBO is developing a TV movie of Fahrenheit 451. Michael B. Jordan and Michael Shannon have signed on to star. No release date has been set.
Director John Waters answers questions for the New York Times’s “By the Book” column. When asked what he reads “for solace” and escape, Waters pointed to Philip Short’s Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare. “I feel so lucky I didn’t have to live under his rule,” he said. “I don’t want to ‘escape’ when I read a book; I want to enter a new world that disturbs me.”
At The Hollywood Reporter, Michael Wolff analyzes the power struggle between the members of the Murdoch family at 21st Century Fox. Wolff credits the firing of Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly to CEO James Murdoch’s dislike for Fox News and its employees, who he considered “thuggish neanderthals.” Wolff writes that the turmoil at Fox News is a sign that James has effectively taken over the company from his father, Rupert. “This means that Fox News, that constant irritant in James’ view of himself as a progressive and visionary television executive, will begin to change,” Wolff writes.
In a hearing for a custody trial, Infowars’s Alex Jones said that his website is “90% hard news,” and compared his videos to John Oliver and Stephen Colbert. Jones, who is under a gag order for the remainder of the trial, also showed his impatience with the heavy media coverage of his custody battle. “During one break in the proceedings,” Charlie Warzel reports, “Jones walked past a corral of reporters in the hallway and muttered, ‘Lotta famous fiction writers out here!’”
For The Stranger, Ijeoma Oluo spent a day with Rachel Dolezal. Oluo writes that she had hoped to never think about Dolezal again, but accepted the assignment after learning about her’s book, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World. By the end of their time together, Oluo realizes that Dolezal’s decision to pretend to be black represents “the ultimate ‘you can be anything’ success story of white America.”