The PEN World Voices Festival opens tonight, with events featuring Colson Whitehead, Chelsea Manning, Leila Slimani, Dave Eggers, and others. The festival will take place all week, with panel discussions featuring Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Colm Toibin, Jenny Zhang, Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Hillary Clinton, and many others.
Anticipating high book-buyer demands, Flatiron books has printed 850,000 copies of James Comey’s book A Higher Loyalty (the initial print run of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury was 150,000). As of Friday, the book (which is scheduled to be released on Tuesday) had already pre-sold 200,000 copies. Comey and Donald Trump are now in what the New York Times calls an “all-out war.” Comey writes in the book that “Donald Trump’s presidency threatens much of what is good in this nation.” Trump has said on Twitter that Comey’s book has “many lies,” and that “when someone attacks me, I always attack back . . . except 100x more.”
USA Today names five books you should know about this week.
Poet-essayist Melissa Broder, whose novel The Pisces is out in May, has made a poster for her reading tour.
Mexican author and translator Sergio Pitol has died. His novels include Mephisto’s Waltz, and he translated many English and Polish authors—Jane Austen, Henry James and Joseph Conrad, Kazimierz Brandys, Witold Gombrowicz—into Spanish.
Tayari Jones—author of the novel An American Marriage, which was selected by Oprah Winfrey for her book club—has been hired as a professor in the MFA program at Emory University.
