Next Friday at Greenlight Books, New Directions will celebrate its eightieth birthday with a party featuring not just champagne but also readings by an amazing group of authors: Anne Carson, László Krasznahorkai, Rivka Galchen, Forrest Gander, John Keene, Bernadette Mayer, and Eliot Weinberger.
Timothy L. O’Brien—a journalist who edited a Pulitzer-winning series about war veterans—was sued by Donald Trump for libel following the publication of O’Brien’s book TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald. Before the suit was dismissed, O’Brien and his legal team were allowed to see Trump’s tax returns. A court order stops him from saying what he saw in those returns, but in a new article, he strongly suggests that the American public would learn a good deal if Trump made his tax filings public.
Katherine Dunn—author of the cult novel Geek Love, a “carnivalesque reversal of ‘traditional’ family values”—has died. Dunn wrote for many publications (The New York Times, Playboy, Vogue) and was a longtime columnist for Portland, Oregon’s Willamette Week. “For nearly 10 years, Katherine Dunn's brilliant prose graced the pages of Willamette Week," says editor and publisher Mark Zusman. "Her boxing coverage, her weekly column and her reportage on the underbelly of Portland were without parallel.” (In 2010, Dunn reviewed a biography of Sugar Ray Robinson for Bookforum.)
Jesse Peretz, a director and producer of the TV show Girls, will direct the film adaptation of Nick Hornby’s novel Juliet, Naked.
FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, author of The Signal and the Noise, blasted the New York Times and its media columnist Jim Rutenberg earlier this week. Rutenberg recently wrote about the many errors the media has made in its predictions about the 2016 presidential race, and singled out Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog for its mistakes in particular primaries. Silver says: “Jim Rutenberg and I were colleagues in 2012 when FiveThirtyEight was part of The New York Times. They were incredibly hostile and incredibly unhelpful to FiveThirtyEight, particularly when FiveThirtyEight tried to do things that blended reporting with kinda more classic techniques of data journalism. When we went to New Hampshire, for example, to go to The New York Times filing center … the political desk is literally giving us the cold shoulder like it’s some high school lunchroom.”
