After nearly forty years with the paper, the New York Times’s chief book critic Michiko Kakutani is stepping down. The Times has a round up of the best of Kakutani’s thirty-year years of reviewing. Vanity Fair’s Joe Pompeo reports that Kakutani accepted a buyout offer, and plans to “branch out and write more essays about culture and politics in Trump’s America.” Known for launching the career of writers like David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith, “Kakutani’s departure will instantly change the shape of the publishing world,” Pompeo writes. “She wielded the paper’s power with remarkable confidence

The Man Booker judging panel has announced the longlist for the 2017 prize. Nominees include Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Zadie Smith’s Swing Time, and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. The shortlist will be announced in September, and the prize will be awarded in October.

Hillary Clinton has released more details about her upcoming book. Originally planned as a book of essays, it has now become a “full memoir.” What Happened, will “give readers an idea of what it’s really like to run for president, especially if you’re a woman,” Clinton

Recently appointed communications director Anthony Scaramucci is offering “amnesty” to any staff members who have leaked information to the press, but reserves the right to “fire everybody” if necessary. “I’m committed to taking the comms shop down to Sarah

A number of former Village Voice writers have signed an open letter to the paper’s owner, criticizing his attempts to weaken the Voice’s union. Signatories include Hilton Als, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Vivian Gornick, among others. “As writers and journalists, we understand all too well the challenges that face print media today,” they write. “That said, we wish to see this beloved paper continue to produce the highest caliber of work — work that deserves and demands your fullest support.”

The New York Times talks to the new owners of the Chicago Sun-Times, a group that includes a former city

Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin has given an update on the sixth book of his Winds of Winter series. Some have said that the book is finished; others have claimed that Martin has yet to write a single word. The author says that neither rumor is true (“I’ve seen some truly weird reports about WOW on the internet of late, by ‘journalists’ who make their stories up out of whole cloth,” Martin writes). He’s hard at work on the book, and it should be published sometime in 2018.

The Library of America has announced that its president, Cheryl Hurley, and its editor-in-chief, Geoffrey O'Brien,

Angels in America playwright Tony Kushner is working on a production about Donald Trump. Rather than a symbolic character, the play will focus directly on Trump during the two years leading up to the 2016 election. “He’s the kind of person, as a writer, I tend to avoid as I think he is borderline psychotic,” Kushner said about the difficulties of writing the play. “I definitely think that incoherence lends itself well to drama, but he really is very boring.”

Bloomberg looks at the Sinclair Broadcast Group, the country’s largest network of TV stations, which requires their affiliated stations

The Brooklyn Public Library announced the longlist for its fiction and nonfiction Literary Prize yesterday. Nominees include Pankaj Mishra’s Age of Anger and David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon, and Eimear McBride’s The Lesser Bohemians and Lidija Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan for fiction. A shortlist will be released in September, and winners will be announced in October.

Novelist Junot Díaz is writing a children’s book. The New York Times writes that Islandborn “grew out of a promise he made to his goddaughters two decades ago, when they asked him to write a book that featured characters

Former New Republic owner and Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes is reportedly shopping a book on wealth imbalance and the American economy. In We Should All Be So Lucky: Notes on Fortune, Hard Work, and the Basic Income, Hughes writes that the solution to rapidly increasing inequality in the US could be solved by creating a universal basic income for “all working middle class and poor Americans who make less than $75,000 a year.” Hughes’s pitch to prospective publishers includes his “personal connections” to journalists, but The Washingtonian writes Hughes may be overlooking one issue: “A

Former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page is shopping a book about alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election that he claims will “prove infinitely more accurate, exciting and insightful” than former FBI director James Comey’s upcoming project. Politics, Lies, And The Wiretap: Inside The Fight To End The 70-Year Cold War will explain how Page’s “personal ties to Russia” led to him becoming “the most prominent victim of the Clinton campaign’s efforts to illegally influence the Obama administration and its politically motivated FBI director James Comey.” One book agent said that the project

James B. Comey is writing a book about his career as a public servant. According to the New York Times, “the book will not be a conventional tell-all memoir, but an exploration of the principles that have guided Mr. Comey through some of the most challenging moments of his legal career.” Those moments include his experiences as deputy attorney general (he refused to declare legal the NSA’s domestic-surveillance program), his days as a US Attorney (when he prosecuted Martha Stewart), and his tenure as the head of the FBI, when he investigated Hillary Clinton’s private email server and attempted

Literary critic and Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo has died at 61. At the New York Review of Books, Perry Link remembers Liu’s life and activism. Link attributes Liu’s independence his upbringing during China’s Cultural Revolution, when schools were closed. “With no teachers to tell him what the government wanted him to think about what he read, he began to think for himself—and he loved it.” Link compares Liu to Chinese President Xi Jinping, who grew up during the same time period but used his time away from the classroom “to begin building a resume that would allow him . . . to one day

The Washington Post looks at the Trump administration’s plan to discredit journalists who report on Donald Trump Jr.’s emails. Sources say that the president’s operatives may take on “an extensive campaign” of combing through reporters’ previously published work “to exploit any mistakes or perceived biases.” The New York Times notes that Trump Jr.’s decision to release his emails ahead of the paper’s report may “have long-term implications for the Trumps’ ability to shape coverage.” At the New Yorker, Joshua Yaffa examines Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya’s relationship to the Kremlin,