The nominees for the 2017 National Book Award in nonfiction have been announced, and include Kevin Young’s Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News, David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the F.B.I., Masha Gessen’s The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, and James Forman Jr.’s Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America. The longlist for fiction will be announced later today.
New York Times reporter Mike Isaac is writing a book about Uber, which will be published in 2019 by Norton. If Issac’s past reporting on the company is any guide, the book won’t be boring. Isaac hopes the book will be able to raise larger questions about Silicon Valley and the sharing economy, as he told Recode: “Can I take lessons from the disasters that happened at Uber and say what it says about Silicon Valley—like how founders have been given total control of their companies and how that’s maybe a mistake?”
Edward Felsenthal has been named Time’s new editor after Nancy Gibbs, who worked at Time for thirty-two years, announced her departure earlier this week.
Amazon has deleted more than nine hundred one-star review of Hillary Clinton’s new memoir, What Happened. The reviews were deemed to be an illegitimate, concerted effort to bring the book’s overall rating down, and were from unverified accounts: According to Quartz’s reporting of the story, only 22 percent of the overall reviews were from readers who had actually purchased the book from Amazon. If you can’t get enough of memoirs from presidential runners-up, The Guardian has a list of ten books by other failed presidential candidates, including God, Grits, and Gravy by Mike Huckabee, Rising to the Challenge: My Leadership Journey by Carly Fiorina, and Why Not Me: The Making and Unmaking of the Franken Presidency by Al Franken.
On the On Being podcast, Junot Diaz makes the case for what he calls “radical hope” in dark political times: “When I look over what my community has done to make democracy possible, when I look at what my community has taught this world about justice and about humanity, in the face of abysmal inhumanities, well, I’ve got to tell you, that alters the calculus of hope. And it gives me hope.”
As part of Brooklyn Book Festival tonight, Greenlight Bookstore is throwing a party; Poets House is hosting Los Angeles–based indie publisher Red Hen Press; the Brooklyn Public Library is celebrating poet Marianne Moore; A Public Space has a launch party for John Haskell’s new book, The Complete Ballet; and the Asian American Writer’s workshop presents “Searching for Home,” a reading and discussion with fiction writer Dina Nayeri and journalist Alia Malek.