Katy Waldman Endeavor Content has bought the film and television rights to Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury. Wolff has signed on as an executive producer, and the Hollywood Reporter writes that “the massive deal is said to be in the seven-figure range.” The New York Times notes that, after Mark Halperin and John Heilemann’s HBO project on the 2016 campaign was cancelled in the wake of sexual misconduct allegations, the adaptation “could be the first major dramatic portrayal of the Trump White House.” Lupita Nyong’o is writing a children’s book. Sulwe will be published by Simon Schuster Books for

Philip Roth “With a mixture of disappointment and relief,” The Awl announces that they will be discontinuing editorial operations at the end of January. The Hairpin will also close at the end of the month. “We’re intensely proud of what we managed to accomplish over the years,” the site’s staff write, “and while most of the credit goes to an astoundingly talented team of writers and editors, the greatest achievement any site can claim is in the quality and fervor of its audience, and on that score we feel like we were the most successful organization ever.” The Wire

Ocean Vuong. Photo: Peter Bienkowski Tom Bower is working on a new book about Prince Charles. Rebel Prince: The Power, Passion and Defiance of Prince Charles will explore the monarch’s “‘desperate bid to rehabilitate himself’ after Princess Diana’s death,” The Bookseller reports. Rebel Prince will be published in the UK next March; the book does not yet have a US publication date. Ocean Vuong has won the TS Eliot prize for his debut poetry collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds. Nieman Lab reports that Los Angeles Times editor Lewis D’Vorkin is hiring journalists away from the Washington Post, the

Akhil Sharma Novelist Stephen King will receive PEN’s American Literary Service Award. PEN president Andrew Solomon (Far from the Tree) says that King “has inspired us to stand up to sinister forces through his rich prose, his generous philanthropy and his outspoken defense of free expression.” “It is generosity which reminds us that we are more than our problems.” In a short video airing at PBS, novelist Akhil Sharma (Family Life) reflects on what it means to belong, and on the importance of thinking about others. HBO has given a sneak peak at Ramin Bahrani’s new adaptation of Ray

Carrie Brownstein Peter Thiel, who funded Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker, has submitted a bid to buy the defunct website. Reuters writes that administrators and lawyers from Gawker’s bankruptcy plan “have tried to block Thiel’s bid,” but that even if they are successful, “Thiel could ask the judge to consider it if it is higher than rival offers.” Carrie Brownstein is working on a show for Hulu based on her memoir, Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl. Search and Destroy follows “a young woman, a band, and a community learning how to be unafraid of their own noise.” Reporter

Jada Yuan Moira Donegan has come forward as the creator of the “Shitty Media Men” spreadsheet, after rumors spread on Twitter that her name would be revealed in an upcoming Harper’s Magazine essay by Katie Roiphe. In her essay, Donegan explains why she started the list, addresses its critics, and describes the aftermath of the spreadsheet going viral: “In the weeks after the spreadsheet was exposed, my life changed dramatically. I lost friends: some who thought I had been overzealous, others who thought I had not been zealous enough. I lost my job, too. The fear of being exposed,

Arthur Miller After holding on to almost two hundred boxes of Arthur Millers’s papers for years, the Harry Ransom Center has formally purchased the playwright’s archive for $2.7 million. Miller first sent parts of his archive to the center in the 1960s, when he was “short on cash and facing a big tax bill.” At the New Republic, Alex Shepard wonders why publisher Henry Holt was not more prepared for Fire and Fury’s explosive sales. Although similar titles about the Trump administration have been published over the last year, few have provoked tweets from the president himself, much less

Michelle Alexander The New Jersey prison system has lifted a ban on Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow after the ACLU called for the book to be made available to inmates. In a statement, New Jersey ACLU director Amol Sinha noted that the state incarcerates black residents at disproportionate rate. “The ratios and percentages of mass incarceration play out in terms of human lives,“ he said. “Keeping a book that examines a national tragedy out of the hands of the people mired within it adds insult to injury.” Los Angeles-based PEN Center USA is merging with New York PEN.

Zia Haider Rahman “Should the demise of the literary novel trouble us?” asks novelist Zia Haider Rahman. “I think the answer is ‘yes,’ but not nearly as much as some literary novelists would have you think.” As she points out, we now have better television. Even amid ample evidence of Donald Trump’s megalomania, Michael Wolff’s Trump book Fire and Fury continues to shock. As Jack Shafer points out: “President Donald Trump could have saved himself a lot of grief if he—or one of his people—had read Michael Wolff’s 2008 book, The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret

Aharon Appelfeld The New York Times has announced that Gregory Cowles will become the Books desk’s senior editor. Tina Jordan of Entertainment Weekly will be taking over Cowles old role as a fiction preview editor and Inside the List columnist, while Emily Eakin, formerly a senior editor at the New Yorker, will become the Books section’s preview editor. Israeli novelist and Holocaust survivor Aharon Appelfeld has died at age eighty-five. Los Angeles Times employees voted yesterday on unionizing the newsroom. The results will be available on January 19. Lawyer Charles Harder has issued a letter on behalf of Trump

Roxanne Gay. Photo: Kevin Nance Roxane Gay has an advice column at the New York Times. In her first installment, Gay encourages two writers who are worried that they’re too old to make a career out of it. “There is no age limit to finding artistic success,” she writes. “Sometimes it happens at 22 and sometimes it happens at 72 and sometimes it doesn’t happen at all.” Fred Bass, owner of New York’s Strand Book Store until his retirement last November, has died at the age of eighty-nine. Bass began working at the store, which his father owned, at

Helen Dunmore, 2014. Photo: Caroline Forbes. Vice has suspended two executives following a December report in the New York Times detailing allegations of sexual misconduct at the company. Andrew Creighton, Vice Media’s president, and Mike Germano, its chief digital officer, have both been placed on leave pending an investigation into charges against the two men. Sarah Broderick, Vice’s chief operating officer and chief financial officer, announced changes on Tuesday to address the issues reported in the Times article, including hiring a new HR head, instituting mandatory sexual harassment training programs, and creating community and mentoring initiatives. As the Times

Fred Moten The New York Daily News has yet to hire a new editor after the December 31 retirement of Arthur Browne, who was also serving as publisher. Though parent company Tronc knew of Browne’s impending resignation, they have not named a permanent or temporary replacement for either position. “I’ve never heard of a paper functioning without at least an acting editor in chief for any period of time,” said Jim Rich, the paper’s editor before Browne. “At a moment where local coverage is teetering on the brink of extinction, it’s depressing to think that this is the state

Jamil Smith The full manuscript of Milo Yiannopoulos’s cancelled autobiography, including editor comments, has been made available in court filings by Simon Schuster. Editorial comments range from questions about sources to requests to “DELETE UGH.” Though some have praised the editor for calling out Yiannopoulos’s bigotry, Jamil Smith pointed out that editor and publisher were not necessarily motivated by any moral concerns. “The editor’s brutal comments are somewhat entertaining,” he writes, “but none of this should distract from the fact that they sought to make his bigotry both digestible and marketable.” BuzzFeed examines the top fifty fake news stories

Paul Yoon Literary Hub contributors detail the books published over the past year that they wished had gotten more attention. Claire Messud recommends Paul Yoon’s The Mountain, while Tracy K. Smith recommends Alicia Suskin Ostriker’s Waiting for the Light. BuzzFeed White House reporter Adrian Carrasquillo has been fired after an investigation into inappropriate messages he sent to a coworker. Crooked Media talks to NBC correspondent and New Yorker reporter Ronan Farrow about his reporting on Harvey Weinstein and the movement against sexual harassment and assault that followed the story’s publication. “It’s understandable and I think mostly a good thing

A. G. Sulzberger In the wake of the New York Times story on Vice’s “degrading and uncomfortable” workplace culture, in which more than two dozen women reported that they had been subjected to, or witnessed, sexual misconduct at the office, Vice founders Shane Smith and Suroosh Alviapoligzed: “Listening to our employees over the past year, the truth is inescapable: from the top down, we have failed as a company to create a safe and inclusive workplace where everyone, especially women, can feel respected and thrive. Cultural elements from our past, dysfunction and mismanagement were allowed to flourish unchecked. .

Jacqueline Rose In Bill de Blasio’s first formal interview with journalists from the now-shuttered local news sites Gothamist and DNAinfo, the New York mayor said that he would be open to using public funds to support independent media. “What’s happening now in New York, if it were to continue, will undermine democracy,” he said. “I’d be open to actually seeing the city invest in

Jann Wenner. Photo: Albert Chau Variety owner Penske Media Company has bought a controlling stake in Rolling Stone parent company Wenner Media for $100 million. Jann Wenner will stay on as editorial director and his company will maintain “majority control and editorial oversight” of the magazine. In an earlier article about the company’s possible buyers, Joe Pompeo noted that Penske was one of the prospective buyers that current employees were “cautiously optimistic” about. “They are a company that understands how to straddle the print and digital landscape and has had some success in breathing new life into legacy brands,”

Zora Neale Hurston HarperCollins is publishing Zora Neale Hurston’s book about the last survivor of the slave trade. Barracoon is comprised of Hurston’s 1931 interviews with Cudjo Lewis, a former slave who was brought to the US in 1860 on one of the last recorded slave ships, and will be released next May. Literary Hub has released their list of their favorite books of the year. This weekend, Cornel West published an article renewing his critique of Ta-Nehisi Coates, calling Coates “the neoliberal face of the black freedom struggle.” The article quickly spurred commentary and criticism on Twitter, with

Kristen Roupenian. Photo: Elisa Roupenian Toha Kristen Roupenian, author of the viral New Yorker short story “Cat Person,” has sold her debut novel to a publisher in the UK, and a bidding war on the US rights for the book has reached over $1 million. Elif Shafak talks to the New York Times about her new novel, Three Daughters of Eve. Novelist Han Kang tells The Guardian that if it wasn’t for her migraines, she may not have become a writer at all. “My migraines are always reminding me that I am human,” she explained. “Because when a migraine