The Man Booker judging panel has announced the longlist for the 2017 prize. Nominees include Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Zadie Smith’s Swing Time, and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. The shortlist will be announced in September, and the prize will be awarded in October.
Hillary Clinton has released more details about her upcoming book. Originally planned as a book of essays, it has now become a “full memoir.” What Happened, will “give readers an idea of what it’s really like to run for president, especially if you’re a woman,” Clinton said in a statement. “Ultimately it’s about resilience, how to get back up after a loss.” The book will be published by Simon & Schuster in September.
Republican Senator Jeff Flake is working on “an ideological manifesto for his own version of conservatism.” Flake was a critic of Trump during the 2016 election, and his book explains the differences between his ideas about governing and those of the president, which he “describes as nationalist and populist in nature.” Flake is working on the book “largely without the knowledge of political advisers,” and anonymous sources say that it is “likely to inflame debate about the direction of the Republican Party.”
James Patterson and Bill Clinton are in Hollywood this week to sell the film rights to their upcoming book, The President is Missing. Although the novel won’t be released until June 2018, directors and producers, including J.J. Abrams, Steven Spielberg, and George Clooney, have scheduled meetings with the authors.
Advisers for the bankruptcy estate of Gawker Media are looking into selling the company’s remaining website, Gawker.com. Although the Univision sale of other Gawker Media properties stipulated that the flagship site could not be used until March of 2018, the advisers hope “to give any interested buyers time to come up with a plan for Gawker” before that date.
The New York Times talks to Max Brooks, the author of the first officially-sanctioned novel based on the video game Minecraft. An avid player, Brooks went to great lengths to make sure that everything in his novel matched the rules of the Minecraft world. “I war-gamed out everything,” he said. “My biggest fear was that somebody tries to play out my book and finds out it won’t work.”