Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor General H. R. McMaster is the latest former member of the Trump administration to start shopping a book. BuzzFeed News reports that the erstwhile national security adviser is working with ICM agent Amanda Urban on his proposal. Wall Street Journal executive editor Matt Murray is taking over for Gerard Baker as the paper’s editor in chief. Baker will stay on as editor at large, a role that includes writing a regular weekend column and hosting a “WSJ-branded news and interview show on Fox Business News.” The Lambda Literary Award winners were announced this week. Roxane Gay won

Porochista Khakpour Porochista Khakpour tells Tin House about writing her memoir, Sick. “I felt I had to be really careful not to make my book appear like it represents the experience of all chronically ill or disabled America,” she said. “In that sense I also felt if I paraded around Audre Lorde’s experience with cancer or even Amy Tan’s with Lyme, I would be creating a sort of wonky narrative dilemma: a sort of forced dependency, a connecting of dots, and for what? For whom? For metaphor? To justify my story?” Former New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani

Michael Lewis Moneyball author Michael Lewis is giving up his position as a contributing writer at Vanity Fair to work for Audible, the Amazon-owned audiobook company. Lewis has signed a multi-year contract with the Audible, for which he will produce original audio nonfiction stories, the first of which will be available in July. “You’re not going to be able to read it, you’re only going to be able to listen to it,” Mr. Lewis says. “I’ve become Audible’s first magazine writer.” At the New York Times, Alexandra Alter uses the move as an opportunity to highlight the growing market

Tommy Orange At the Los Angeles Review of Books Blog, Rebecca Schultz talks to The Perfect Nanny author Leïla Slimani about the strange space that nannies occupy in a household and how identity factored into her novel. “I don’t care about identity, I don’t really understand what it means. I’m not interested in what people are; I’m interested in what people do,” Slimani said. “So in my books I like to make plenty of references to identity, and often with an ironic tone, just to say that maybe identity is not the clue, and it can’t help the reader

ANACHRONISM WAS THE RULE at the political conventions of the summer of 1968. It was anachronism that generated both boredom and spectacular violence. On Miami Beach it was as if the cast of Our Town had been gathered and multiplied by a few thousand to fill out the GOP ranks: The Republicans were a party stuck in the past and trying to perpetuate it. In Chicago you could say the demonstrators represented the future and that the police who beat them and arrested them were punishing the future for coming too soon. Or you could say that they represented a

WILLIAM CALLEY’S EARLY CHILDHOOD, in a wealthy neighborhood of Miami, was uneventful. He was short—five foot three—and came to weigh around 130 pounds. Because he had reddish hair, he was given the nickname Rusty. He got into trouble, in the normal way of teenagers, but never with drugs or violence. He had friends. Things took a turn for the worse: diabetes afflicted his father, cancer his mother. The family business (construction) failed; they moved from Miami to their vacation home in North Carolina. Calley returned to Miami to complete high school. He graduated at the bottom of his class. He

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL is Godard at his worst—full of fumbled “experiments,” pompous pseudo-militancy, and flat, failed, cryptic jokes. I love it. Made in collaboration with the Rolling Stones and originally titled One Plus One, it serves as a kind of stool sample of 1968—the year of the Paris insurrection, the year of the Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy assassinations, the year that brought the student movement in advanced capitalist countries to a screeching ideological climax that must have looked, at the time, like revolution.

John Carreyrou New York magazine talks to Bad Blood author John Carreyrou, whose reporting on Theranos and CEO Elizabeth Holmes ultimately brought down the company. Carreyrou says that he understands why other publications wrote glowing profiles of Holmes and her blood-testing machine, even though it didn’t actually work. “You could make a case that maybe they should have done more reporting beyond interviewing her and her immediate entourage,” he said. “But how much is a writer/reporter to blame when the subject is bald-face lying to him, too?” HBO recently announced that Alex Gibney has signed on to direct a

David Sedaris The Nobel Prize for Literature will not be awarded again until the Swedish Academy’s issues are resolved, The Guardian reports. Although the group has announced plans to award two prizes in 2019, Nobel Foundation executive director Lars Heikensten wrote on the prize’s website that he hopes “that this will be the case, but it depends on the Swedish Academy restoring its trust.” In a radio interview, Heikensten also urged the current members of the academy to resign. “I think everyone needs to think about whether they are good for the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Prize and

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie The Library of Congress has announced the lineup for this year’s National Book Festival main stage. Authors include Amy Tan, Dave Eggers, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Emily Cooke is joining the New Republic as editorial director. Cooke was most recently the deputy editor of Harper’s Magazine, and previously worked as an editor at Bookforum and the New Inquiry. Alex Bowler has been hired as publisher at Faber. The Granta executive publisher will replace Faber’s current publisher Mitzi Angel, who is leaving the company for Farrar, Straus and Giroux this

Noah Shachtman Daily Beast editor in chief John Avlon is leaving the website to become a full-time political analyst at CNN. He will be replaced by Noah Shachtman, who currently serves as executive editor. In a memo to staff, Shachtman wrote that he is excited to be the website’s third editor in chief. “The first chapter of The Beast’s history saw an astonishing launch—followed by the Newsweek merger. In the second chapter, we parted ways with the magazine, reestablished our foundations, and then, improbably, turned this place into a scoop machine,” he writes. “Chapter three is poised to be

Lauren Groff. Photo: Megan Brown Journalists from CNN, Politico, and other outlets were banned from attending an Environmental Protection Agency summit on water contaminants this week. When one CNN reporter showed their credentials and attempted to enter the conference, a security guard told them “they ain’t doing the CNN stuff,” and an Associated Press journalist was physically removed from the summit after requesting to speak with a public affairs staffer about the ban. A federal judge has ruled that Trump cannot legally block Twitter users from viewing his posts. Facebook has announced three new tactics for fighting fake news

Philip Roth Philip Roth has died at the age of eighty-five. The New York Times obituary calls Roth “the last of the great white males,” along with John Updike and Saul Bellow, and quotes Roth comparing himself to the two authors: “Updike and Bellow hold their flashlights out into the world, reveal the world as it is now. I dig a hole and shine my flashlight into the hole.” At The Guardian, writers and friends remember Roth, who won the Pulitzer prize for his 1997 novel American Pastoral and is one of the most award-winning novelists in American literature.

Peter Mayer Interview magazine is shutting down after nearly fifty years. Founded by Andy Warhol in 1969, the publication has become entangled in legal challenges from former staffers who claim lost wages worth hundred of thousands of dollars, as well as a charge that the former creative director, Karl Templer, overstepped “the professional line.” The New York Times is developing a television series based on “Overlooked,” the paper’s ongoing feature about important women and people of color who did not receive a Times obituary. The scripted series will have ten episodes per season, each telling one person’s story. All

Barbara Ehrenreich Book deals this week: Chris Fanz, a former member of the Talking Heads, sold his memoir Remain in Love to St. Martin’s Press; and Megan Angelo, a journalist and former contributing editor to Glamour, sold her debut novel, which has been described as a combination of Station Eleven and Black Mirror, to Graydon House for a reported six figures. Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of Nickeled and Dimed, has written a book about why she, at seventy-six, will not seek any preventative medical treatments, like cancer screenings and checkups. In Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of

Sergio De La Pava. Photo: Sharon Daniels Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon are editing an anthology to commemorate the centennial of the American Civil Liberties Union. The still-untitled book—which includes essays and stories from Marlon James, Jesmyn Ward, Colson Whitehead, Hanya Yanagihara, and more—will be published by Simon Schuster in 2020. At Literary Hub, Michael Ondaatje lists the books that he continues to reread. Tobias Carroll talks to Sergio De La Pava about rich people, football, and trying to write a topical novel. “The novel’s never going to be good at dealing with that kind of topicality,” De La

Saraciea J. Fennell At the New York Times, Concepción de León reports on the upcoming Bronx Book Festival, organized by Saraciea J. Fennell. A publicist for Tor Books and a Bronx native, Fennell says she was inspired to create the festival after attending a similar event in Brooklyn. “I thought to myself, ‘This is amazing,’” she recalled. “‘Why doesn’t the Bronx have something like this?’” The event will be held this Saturday at Fordham Plaza. The O. Henry Prize Stories for 2018 have been announced. The selected works will be anthologized in a collection, which will be published this

Michelle Tea Queer Eye fashion expert Tan France is writing a memoir, which will be published by St. Martin’s Press next year. The still-untitled book details France’s story of growing up as “one of the few people of color” in small-town Northern England and his “experience of coming out to his family” and “revealing to them that he is happily married to his partner of over 10 years, a self-described gay Mormon cowboy from Salt Lake City.” Michiko Kakutani has released the cover and publication date of her upcoming book. The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the

Michael Chabon Tom Wolfe, the writer and reporter known for creating New Journalism in the 1960s, died yesterday in Manhattan. He was 87. New York Times reporter Scott Shane considers the difficulties of reporting on leaks during and after the 2016 election. Shane feels that while many leaks are newsworthy, relying on old methods of reporting aren’t sufficient for covering them. “For the most part, the 2016 stories based on the hacked Democratic emails revealed true and important things. . . . The problem was that Russian hackers chose not to deliver to American voters the same inside material

Ronan Farrow Ronan Farrow, the Pulitzer-winning journalist who has written extensively about sexual misconduct for the New Yorker, has sold a book called Catch and Kill to Little, Brown. According to the publisher, the book is “a deeply personal story about a reporter grappling with how much to put on the line to protect the truth, and a story that expands our understanding of the forces in law, politics, and media that maintained a conspiracy of silence around Weinstein and other men in power committing gross abuses with impunity.” Director Ramin Bahrani, whose adaptation of Fahrenheit 451 begins airing