David Grann talks to Lit Hub about crime reporting, watching his books be turned into films, and his most recent work, Killers of the Flower Moon.
The New York Times profiles Shannon Donnelly, the Palm Beach journalist who has covered Donald Trump since he purchased his Mar-a-Lago estate. Donnelly and Trump seem to share a mutual respect, although Trump’s animosity toward journalists can sometimes be taken out on Donnelly as well. After one unfavorable article, Trump wrote to her in 1996 with a deal: if she reigned in her coverage of him, he wrote, “I will promise not to show you as the crude, fat and obnoxious slob which everyone knows you are.” In a response, Donnelly wrote in her column, “Crude, fat and obnoxious I can’t argue with. But slob, no.”
At The Guardian, Danuta Kean laments the rise of political satire books composed of empty pages, after Donald Trump recommended one in a tweet. “The only laughter I hear around blank books is that of the publishers, as they pocket the profits from books as subtle and revealing as a blow to the head,” she writes. “Perhaps the funniest thing to emerge from all of this is that Trump has yet to recommend a book (apart from his own) with words in it.”