The New York Public Library has announced the finalists for this year’s Helen Bernstein Book Award, which honors journalistic works of nonfiction. Nominees include Gary Younge’s Another Day in the Death of America, Jane Mayer’s Dark Money, and Charlotte McDonald-Gibson’s Cast Away. The winner will be announced in May.
Walter Mosley will release a new novel with Mullholland Books, an imprint of Little, Brown. Down the River Unto the Sea follows a Brooklyn private investigator as he investigates “the case of a Black civil rights activist convicted of murdering two city policemen.” The book will be published in February 2018.
Eileen Myles talks to The Rumpus about her new poetry record, open mic nights, and feminism. Myles discusses the “corralling” that happens to women writers when they are interviewed about their work. “Men are allowed to carry on,” she says, “and women are always asked how they carry on as women.”
Deadline Hollywood reports that fifty years after it was first published, the film rights to Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold” have been optioned by Sinatra’s daughters, Nancy and Tina. The siblings plan to have Talese and Nick Pileggi write the screenplay.
On Saturday, President Trump tweeted that, unlike every president in the last thirty years, he will not be attending the 2017 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The news came one day after Bloomberg decided to cancel their afterparty, an event that their usual co-host, Vanity Fair, had already opted out of earlier this year. BuzzFeed reports that CNN is currently debating whether or not to attend the dinner.
At the New Yorker, Evan Osnos looks at past presidents’ relationships with the press and compares it to our current commander-in-chief’s war against the media. After the president excluded CNN, the New York Times, and other outlets from a press gaggle on Friday afternoon, it Trump’s treatment of the press might be the most extreme of any other president. Even though some have gone to great lengths to avoid the media—Teddy Roosevelt once had a tumor removed on a friend’s yacht in order to keep the news quiet—Osnos writes that “almost every President has adopted a fruitful, if tense, mutual dependence with the press. Each needs something from the other, and both sides know it.”
Tonight at the Brooklyn Public Library, Finks author Joel Whitney and filmmaker Immy Humes discuss “the notable publishers and authors whose reputations were tarnished” after working with the CIA.
