Edward Snowden’s memoir, Permanent Record, will go on sale on Tuesday. Metropolitan Books has—no surprise—kept the contents of the book very secret, but two critics have managed to get their hands on advance copies. Jennifer Szalai reviews the memoir for the Times (she calls it “a riveting account and a curious artifact”), and Christian Lorentzen reviews it for the London Review of Books. Both writers note that in the book’s acknowledgments, Snowden thanks novelist-critic Joshua Cohen “for taking me to writing school." They also note that Cohen’s 2015 novel Book of Numbers features a character

Ian McEwan is publishing a new satirical novel about Brexit later this month. In The Cockroach, “Jim Sams wakes and finds he must endure a worse fate” than Kafka’s Gregor Samsa: Instead of a beetle, Sams “has become the British prime minister.” “As the nation tears itself apart, constitutional norms are set aside, parliament is closed down so that the government cannot be challenged at a crucial time and ministers lie about it shamelessly in the old Soviet style, and when many Brexiters in high places seem to crave the economic catastrophe of a no deal and English nationalist extremists are

Faber & Faber is publishing an anthology of late journalist Lyra McKee’s work. McKee has already signed a contract with the publisher when she was murdered by New IRA gunmen last April. Lyra McKee: Lost, Found, Remembered will be published in April 2020.

Journalist Rainesford Stauffer has sold a book to Harper Perennial. An Ordinary Age will be “a narrative investigation into the challenges of emerging adulthood in contemporary America.”

At Entertainment Weekly, Laura van den Berg reveals the cover of her upcoming short story collection and reflects on the importance of the form. “Falling in

Ruth Reichl remembers her editor Susan Kamil, who died earlier this week at the age of sixty-nine. “Susan’s ability to read my mind astonished me; our editing sessions often felt like a visit to a psychiatrist,” she writes. “Memoir or novel, it was exactly the same. Even fictional characters were so real to Susan that she wanted to know what they were feeling, doing, wearing, even when they stepped off the page.”

“Language is the substance of literature, but language also locks it up again, confining it to silence and obscurity,” says Jhumpa Lahiri on the importance of translation. “Only works

Europa Editions has released an excerpt from the beginning of a new Elena Ferrante novel. The still-untitled book, which will be released in Italy in November, does not yet have a US release date and will be translated by Ann Goldstein.

Attica Locke talks to The Guardian about forgiveness, home, and her new book, Heaven, My Home. “I live in LA now, but Texas is my home in a way that will never be displaced in my heart and soul. It’s the lens through which I see the world,” she said. “I don’t mean its current state or politics. I mean I come from rural, agrarian people. There’s a fortitude I

Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement will be published on Tuesday. According to the New York Times, the paper where the two authors broke the Weinstein story, the book will name many previously unnamed key sources, as well as those who tried to stymie the Weinstein investigation. Among those who helped to bring Weinstein down: his own accountant. Alexandra Alter writes: “Drawing on new reporting and previously undisclosed corporate records, emails and text messages, She Said uncovers more on the extent of Mr. Weinstein’s

Former press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders is writing a book, the New York Times reports. “I’m excited to tell my story about the challenges of being a working mom at the highest level of American politics and my role in the historic fight raging between the Trump administration and its critics for the future of our country,” Sanders said in a press release. The book will be published next fall by St. Martin’s Press.

Biographer and editor James Atlas has died at the age of seventy.

Time magazine has named Susanna Schrobsdorff as both executive editor and senior VP of partnerships, a move

At Catapult, Ruth Curry and Micaela Durand remember author Jade Sharma, who died in July at age thirty-nine. “Jade was late for everything so it is a tiny surprise that dying is the one thing she came to early. That is the kind of joke she’d enjoy,” remembers Curry. “She was uniquely talented, and it breaks my heart that I will never read anything new from her again.” “The world is less dark without you in it and I don’t mean better,” writes Durand. “I hope wherever you are you’re not bored.”

At Columbia Journalism Review, Sam Thielman reflects on the decline of the political cartoon.

BuzzFeed’s

Emily Doe, the woman whose statement at Brock Turner’s sentencing for assaulting her went viral after being published by BuzzFeed, is writing a memoir. Know My Name will be published under Doe’s real name, Chanel Miller, by Viking. “I jumped out of my chair to acquire it,” Viking editor in chief Andrea Schulz told the New York Times. “It was just obvious to me from the beginning what she had to say and how different it was and how extraordinarily well she was going to say it. She had the brain and the voice of a writer from the very beginning, even in that situation.”

At Literary Hub, Marcus

The Booker Prize shortlist has been announced. The finalists include Salman Rushdie, Lucy Ellmann, Bernardine Evarist, Chigozie Obioma, Elif Shafak, and Maragaret Atwood. Atwood was nominated for The Testament (her forthcoming sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale), which will be published in the US on September 10th. The chairman of the Booker’s judging panel praised Atwood’s book, calling it “a savage and beautiful novel that speaks to us today with unusual conviction and power.”

The Verge looks at how coordinated one-star reviews can sabotage a podcast.

At the New Yorker’s Page Turner blog, Ceridwen

Vice Media is moving away from entertainment and lifestyle content and shifting toward news. The company’s cable channel, Viceland, is cutting jobs. In late 2018, the Wall Street Journal reported that Vice was on track to lose about fifty million dollars that year, and, in January, the organization laid off roughly 10% of staff.

The long-awaited sequel to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale will be published on September 10th. At the New York Times, Joumana Khatib runs down everything you should read and watch in preparation.

Ryan Lizza has announced on Twitter that he is joining Politico.

At the New York Times, Parul Sehgal reviews Salman Rushdie’s latest novel, Quichotte, finding that the exuberance and panache of his early work has now become formulaic and mannered: “He is a writer in free fall. What happened?”

In The Guardian, war correspondent Sara Firth wonders if anyone is still paying attention to the war in Syria: “When I first started reporting inside Syria at the very beginning of the war I felt humbled at being entrusted with the brave stories of the Syrian men and women paying such a high price in asking for freedom in their own country. Now, I feel humiliation.