It's not easy to out-drama-queen Donald Trump (whose unexpected success in the presidential race has inspired publisher Thomas Dunne to hurry a new biography into print), but Rand Paul and Chris Christie seem to have managed it at last night's debate.
You probably noticed that Melville House has brought out the Pope's encyclical on climate change as a book. But you may not know that Pope Francis is now also a Verso author. You can get hold of his latest work, hailed as "an urgent call to action," here for free—and you won't want to miss it.
Clickbait with a cause: Gaza gets the Buzzfeed treatment.
Ilan Stavans, author and publisher of Restless Books, which recently launched an annual prize for New Immigrant Writing (fiction submissions will be open September through December), describes his ambitions for the venture: “I’m not just looking for realistic, socially conscious literature. That would be a mistake. I’m hoping for a David Foster Wallace with an accent.”
Ninety-nine-year-old George Braziller, of the eponymous publishing company, has written a memoir-in-vignettes, mostly about writers, books, and so on (though he does also manage to make out with Marilyn).
The University of East Anglia (whose Creative Writing MA is the UK’s answer to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop) has created a new archive. You can see some of the Doris Lessing material online, and you may also be able to profit from her agent’s advice (given while Lessing was trying to publish her first novel): “Don’t be a prima donna till you are one.”
Authors worried about lackluster book sales should simply go back in time and marry Jon Stewart. His brief plug for his wife’s book apparently took its Amazon ranking from 244,740 to seven (above Ta-Nehisi Coates; only just below Dr. Seuss and Harper Lee) within a couple of days.
Joanna Coles, the editor under whom Cosmopolitan has somewhat changed direction, is deftly handling a recent attack on the magazine from Victoria Hearst (heiress to the company that owns it), who wants to protect America’s children from its corrupting cover lines.
Everybody’s sad about Brazenhead Books, evicted at last not long ago—but it looks like there might be a new secret location come September.
