After more than a decade of silence, the New York Ghost—the literary newsletter created by novelist Ed Park—has reappeared with a new issue, featuring original work by Ling Ma, Julia Kardon, Lucas Adams, and Courtney Dodson.
The legendary Bay Area bookseller City Lights, currently closed due to the coronavirus, was on the verge of closing for good. But then customers donated more than $365,000 in a single day.
David Quammen—author of the excellent 2012 book Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic as well as a study of Ebola—has sold a book about COVID-19 to Simon & Schuster. Quammen's new study, scheduled to be published in 2021, will aim to show why the current pandemic “was predictable (and even predicted).” According to the publisher, the book will also lay out “why the response to [the pandemic] was so incompetent, the prospect of discovering a vaccine or therapy, and how we will have to learn to live with this and other novel viruses.”
The economic changes within the publishing world are causing literary agents to rethink how—and when—to pitch their clients’ manuscripts.
Critic Ron Charles revisits Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, calling it the “most famous act of social distancing,” while also noting how the book makes a case for the importance of human contact and community.
