Porochista Khakpour tells Tin House about writing her memoir, Sick. “I felt I had to be really careful not to make my book appear like it represents the experience of all chronically ill or disabled America,” she said. “In that sense I also felt if I paraded around Audre Lorde’s experience with cancer or even Amy Tan’s with Lyme, I would be creating a sort of wonky narrative dilemma: a sort of forced dependency, a connecting of dots, and for what? For whom? For metaphor? To justify my story?”
Former New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani talks toVanity Fair about why she decided to write The Death of Truth. “One reason I wrote this book is to call attention to those who in their own times found what Margaret Atwood has called the ‘danger flags,’” she said, “in this case the denunciation of ‘fake news’ and the citing of ‘alternative facts’ by Trump and his White House.”
In the New York Times’s Reader Center, reporter Rukmini Callimachi and editor Michael Slackman answer questions about the 15,000 ISIS documents collected by Callimachi for her article, “The ISIS Files.”
The Break author Marian Keyes has accused the judges of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize of sexism after noting that only three women have won the award in nearly two decades. “Power and money are lovely, and those who have it want to hold onto it. One way of keeping those who don’t have it from having it is to mock them and mock the things they love,” she said. “It becomes a self-perpetuating cycle.”
Bill Clinton and James Patterson’s publicity tour for The President Is Missing is off to a rocky start, according to Entertainment Weekly’s David Canfield. “With Patterson awkwardly by his side, Clinton was grilled, particularly, by NBC News on Today, about his affair with Monica Lewinsky while he was in office,” Canfield reports. Reviews of the book have also been less than glowing. The Guardian’s Steven Poole points out that the title “fake news” since “the president isn’t missing,” and warns that “readers hoping for spicy revelations about what really goes on in the White House are likely to feel short-changed by bromides such as, ‘Sooner or later, every president faces decisions in which the right choice is bad politics, at least in the short term’, or the revelation that there is a one-lane bowling alley in the White House basement.”