The Times is comparing the book tour for Michelle Obama’s Becoming, which will be released on November 13, to that of a pop megastar: “While other authors typically follow a circuit that may include podcast interviews and stops at the 92nd Street Y in New York and Powell’s Books in Portland, Ore., Mrs. Obama is set to embark on a 10-city tour put together by Live Nation, the world’s largest concert promoter, which manages about 500 artists, including Miley Cyrus, Beyoncé and U2. Tickets are available, while they last, from Ticketmaster.”
At The Atlantic, Meghan O’Rourke weighs in on Ian Buruma’s dismissal from the New York Review of Books. “Disconcertingly, Buruma believed the Review was doing something intellectually interesting in publishing the Ghomeshi essay, a misjudgment of epic proportions.”
Ruth Franklin, the author of Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, talks with the National Book Critics Circle about the “craft of criticism.”
The Los Angeles Clippers just hired a writer, Lee Jenkins, best known for the profiles he writes for Sports Illustrated. As Ben McGrath points out at the New Yorker: “In this post-‘Moneyball’ era, many sports franchises have gone to great lengths to maximize their statistical focus, in some cases hiring journalists with a quantitative bent.”
Two years after their merger, Soft Skull Press and Catapult are, according to Publishers’ Weekly, “seeing considerable sales success.”
The judges of this year’s Man Booker Prize is criticizing authors for being too “long-winded.” (In other Man Booker news, Daisy Johnson, at twenty-seven, is the youngest writer to ever be short-listed for the prize. Her book Everything Under, a retelling of the Oedipus myth, will be published in the US in October.)