Granta has released their annual list of the best young American novelists, which includes Ottessa Moshfegh, Garth Risk Hallberg, Yaa Gyasi, and Emma Cline, among others. At The Guardian, Michelle Dean writes that “the list’s apparent lack of theme or consistency” is representative of post-Trump America. “Though the power and the strife of the country might be at the forefront of their minds, especially now, especially after November,” she writes, “I would be surprised if any novelist on this list thought of themselves as having articulated something about that big fractious concept known as ‘America.’”
Barack Obama’s former photographer Pete Souza is working on a book for Little, Brown. Obama: An Intimate Portrait: The Historic Presidency in Photographs will be published in November, and includes over three hundred photos of the former president from Souza’s collection of ten thousand.
At Backchannel, Steven Levy talks to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey about the company’s growth, continued digital harassment, and Donald Trump’s continued tweeting. Dorsey says he’s not surprised that Trump’s tweetstorms have not abated. “If you were him,” he asked, “why change the momentum of what made you win in the first place?”
Former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson is writing a book. Be Fierce: Stop Harassment and Take Your Power Back “will encourage women to fight against harassment and abuse in every aspect of their lives, from schoolyard bullying to the gender pay gap,” and will also include “a playbook to help women and men better understand and combat harassment in the workplace. The book will be published by Hachette imprint Center Street Books next September.
Reporter and anchor Kelly Wright has joined the racial discrimination lawsuit against Fox News, which now has thirteen plaintiffs. In his suit, Wright said that he was “shunned” from Bill O’Reilly’s show for pitching “a series of positive stories about the African-American community” because the segments “showed Blacks in ‘too positive’ a light.” In a press conference yesterday, Wright said that he was initially reluctant to join the lawsuit. “When my colleagues from other departments began to reveal their encounters with blatant acts of discrimination in their departments, I watched it. I prayed about it. I cried over it,” he said. “I could no longer sit in silence, collect my paycheck, and act like I didn’t experience racial bias on my own level as an on-air personality.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me is being adapted into a stage production for the Apollo Theater. The performance will include video projections, excerpts from Coates’s book, and music by Jason Moran. According to Kamilah Forbes, the executive producer of the Apollo and director of the production, Coates will offer “creative guidance” to the project “and may appear in the production.”