paper trail

Ragnar Jonasson signs with Minotaur; Protesters to send books to Trump

Ragnar Jónasson

The Guardian and 4th Estate are looking for submissions for the BAME short story prize. The competition aims to highlight the work of black, Asian, and minority ethnic writers in the UK and Ireland. “It is not a shortage of talent and confidence among the UK’s BAME writers that is preventing their work from making it to our bookshelves,” Sian Cain writes.

Crime novelist Ragnar Jónasson has signed a deal with Minotaur, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press. His first book in his new series will be published in June 2018.

Michael Luo is taking over as the New Yorker’s website editor. Luo was an investigative reporter at the New York Times until he was hired by the New Yorker in October as the magazine’s investigative editor.

Susan Sarandon, Nick Offerman, and Diane Kruger have signed on for parts in Butterfly in the Typewriter, a film about the story behind John Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces. The movie is scheduled for release in 2018.

In a speech to the U.S. Central Command yesterday, President Trump claimed that journalists are not reporting on terrorist attacks. Trump referred to previous attacks in Europe, and said that “in many cases the very, very dishonest press doesn’t want to report it. They have their reasons, and you understand that.” Philip Bump explained that the lack of reporting on certain incidents is not because of ulterior motives, but rather the regular and necessary filtering of news. “If your home is burglarized, it may not make the cut,” Bump writes. “This probably isn’t because the Channel 5 news director has a vendetta against you; it’s that there are limited resources.”

After referring to a fictitious terrorist attack in Bowling Green, Kentucky, Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway said that she misspoke. But newly released interviews from Cosmopolitan and TMZ show that Conway has referenced the “Bowling Green massacre” at least two other times. On January 29, she told TMZ that “there were two Iraqis who came here, got radicalized, joined ISIS, and then were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green attack on our brave soldiers.” Later that day, she told Cosmopolitan that the two Iraqi men “were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green massacre of taking innocent soldiers' lives away."

Protesters have found a new way to register their dissent with the White House: by sending piles of books. “Bury the White House in Books” hopes to make it clear to the president that the US is “a republic of letters rather than fear.” But the Huffington Post’s Claire Fallon cautions that it’s unlikely Trump will heed any of the lessons found in The Handmaid’s Tale or any of the other titles being sent. “No matter how many times we thoughtfully publish helpful, diverse reading lists for President Trump, and no matter how many volumes of serious presidential biographies are slyly slipped onto his nightstand by more intellectual advisors,” writes Fallon, “Trump almost definitely isn’t going to read any of them.”

Tonight at Greenlight Bookstore’s new location in the Prospect Lefferts Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn, Vinson Cunningham talks to A.O. Scott about his book Better Living Through Criticism.