The National Book Association has chosen the finalists for its nonfiction award, including Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, and Heather Ann Thompson’s Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy, among others.
After meeting with a small group of writers over drinks at a conference this weekend, author Suki Kim was shocked to find her comments quoted in the New York Times. Rod Nordland’s article on Lionel Shriver’s controversial keynote at the Brisbane Writers Festival included a quote by Kim naming an author she felt was unfairly praised. Kim is not happy about seeing what she thought was a private conversation in the paper of record: “This is so unethical. It’s not acceptable what he did. . . . I would never talk about another writer in public. It’s so ungenerous and tacky.” The Times’s public editor Liz Spayd agreed that Nordland’s reporting was “outside the bounds of good journalistic practice,” but says it’s too late to remove the quote.
Reagan Arthur—the publisher of Little, Brown—has bought Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner’s debut novel, Heather, the Totality. Inspired by Weiner’s observation of an Upper East Side teenager that he sensed was in “animal danger,” the “dark fable set in contemporary Manhattan” will be published in Fall 2017.
Vice News has filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the IRS in a bid to publicize Donald Trump’s tax records after the agency ignored Vice’s requests for expedited processing. They have also filed suit against the FBI for ignoring requests to release documents—”if any exist”—relating to the Republican candidate’s appeal Russia to track down missing emails from Clinton’s server and his allusion to assassinating the Democratic nominee. Vice has also delayed the premiere of their nightly news show Vice News Tonight by two weeks.
Hachette Books will publish The Most Beautiful,a memoir by Prince’s first wife, Mayte Garcia, in April 2017.
Tonight in the lead-up to the Brooklyn Book Festival, Teddy Wayne reads from his new novel Loner at Book Court; members of the National Book Critics Circle “discuss the art of writing about books” at the Center for Fiction; and Patti Smith celebrates the release of M Train at Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope.