Former Boston Globe theater critic Patti Hartigan has signed on to write a biography of August Wilson. Hartigan talked to the New York Times about the difficulty of capturing all aspects of the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright in a single book. “I want it to be a legacy biography and a literary biography,” Hartigan said. “I want it to show him as a human being and an artist. But I don’t have 2,000 pages.” The tentatively-titled August Wilson: The Kiln in Which He Was Fired will be published in 2019 by 37 INK, an imprint of Atria Books.
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, whose work lead to the publishing of the Panama Papers, has chosen to separate from its parent organization, the Center for Public Integrity. The decision was motivated by looming staff cuts ordered by CPI. "Our team had achieved what had never been achieved before,” said ICIJ director Gerard Ryle. “And here I was, facing the prospect of having to lay off journalists that were the heroes of this story." The group is currently gathering funding from a variety of sources.
The Times travels to Kiev to report on StopFake, the Ukrainian news program where “everything is a lie, from start to finish.” The program has spent the past three years debunking fake news stories being spread by the Russian government, such as false reports of ISIS training camps opening in the country or Russian-speaking children being crucified. In that time, the show’s “headlines have declared what did not happen and what was not said, and the heroism or villainy of people who never existed.”
At the Paris Review blog, Albert Mobilio surveys an exhibition of poet and composer Jackson Mac Low’s art at the Drawing Center in New York. “Mac Low—whose texts were often meant to be performed and, truly, were best comprehended in that manner—has staged the words on these ‘pages’ as carefully as a director blocks a complex scene,” Mobilio writes.
Tonight at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn, Lauren Elkin celebrates the release of her new book, Flâneuse.
