Arundhati Roy 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

Clarice Lispector 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

Hilary Mantel 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 alderman and

George R.R. Martin 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

Tony Kushner. Photo: Ed Ritger 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,

Eimear McBride 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 like

Stuart Hall 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 remarkable number

Joe Biden. Photo: Marc Nozell 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 sounds

Christopher Bollen 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

Liu Xiaobo 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

Zadie Smith 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, while Jeffrey Toobin looks at whether the emails

Mika Brzezinski. Photo: Steve Jozefczyk Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski has signed a three-book contract with Weinstein Books. The deal includes an updated version of her 2011 book, Know Your Value: Women, Money, and Getting What You’re Worth, which will be published in the fall of 2018. The other two books, Comeback Careers and an untitled guide for job-searching millennials, will be published around the same time. According to Page Six, the deal was already in the works before Trump’s recent tweets, but “it is hoped that Brzezinski could tackle her clash with the president in a new chapter

Denis Johnson Moonlight director Barry Jenkins is working on a film based on James Baldwin’s novel If Beale Street Could Talk. Jenkins wrote the screenplay in 2013, and spent the intervening years getting permission from the Baldwin Estate. Gloria Karefa-Smart, Baldwin’s sister, called Jenkins “a sublimely conscious and gifted filmmaker” and said that his “medicine for melancholy impressed us so greatly that we had to work with him.” The film is expected to start production next fall. The Library of Congress has announced that late novelist Denis Johnson will win this year’s Prize for American Fiction. The award will

Colson Whitehead While he was at Fox News, Bill O’Reilly was an unflagging promoter of his own books. Since his unceremonious departure from the network on April 11, his book sales have dipped significantly, the Washington Post reports. O’Reilly’s Old School, which he cowrote with Bruce Feirstein, opened at number one on the New York Times Bestseller list when it was released in March, and more than 67,000 copies were sold in April. But in June, the book’s sales plummeted to around 2,400. Novelist Margaret Atwood has proclaimed on Twitter that she would like Drake to make a cameo in

Rebecca Entel. Photo: Elizabeth McQuern In the New York Times’s new “Reader Center,” executive editor Dean Baquet addresses questions about changes to the copy editing system at the paper. Noting that the decision is not based on financial concerns, Baquet points out that the previous editing system at the paper was not designed with the internet in mind. “We have to streamline that system and move faster in the digital age,” Baquet explains. “If the Supreme Court issues a major ruling at 10 a.m., our readers expect to hear about it within minutes. And they’d like an analysis not

Teju Cole The Moscow Times is releasing its final print issue today. The paper will continue to publish on the web, and many employees have been let go. The paper “has played a unique role in covering Russian affairs and politics from the inside,” editor Mikhail Fishman said. “I hope it will continue to stick to these principles throughout the future.” Abby Ohlheiser attempts to explain the alt-right backlash against CNN after the network supposedly blackmailed an anonymous Reddit user into apologizing for a GIF he created of Donald Trump wrestling CNN to the ground. Although the user apologized

Joan Didion The final installment of Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” trilogy will likely be delayed, according to the novelist. The Mirror and the Light was originally scheduled for 2018, but Mantel told an audience at her most recent BBC lecture that it was “increasingly unlikely” that the book would be published by then. But Mantel says that the delay has nothing to do with the end of the series. “People ask me if I’m having trouble killing off Thomas Cromwell,” she said. “No, why would I?” The Wall Street Journal has closed eight of their website’s verticals, including China

Gregory Pardlo The progressive online news organization ThinkProgress has plans to expand its staff and to start publishing its content on WordPress, the site it used before moving to Medium in 2016. ThinkProgress is one of many publishers that have left Medium this year. Poynter explains the exodus: “At issue for most publishers was the decision made by Medium to discontinue its ‘promoted stories’ native advertising program. That program was a lynchpin for agreements between Medium and publishers that guaranteed them revenue based on the amount of readership they were able to draw. Without promoted stories—and an ad sales

Liu Xiaobo MTV News has announced that it will be shifting its focus away from reporting and longform essays and toward video. The company laid off several writers and editors—many of whom had been hired from Grantland when that site folded in 2015. At New York magazine, Brian Feldman explains why media brands “pivot to video” and what that trend means for the future of writing online: “The lesson of MTV News and its similarly pivoted peers may simply be that profit-seeking start-ups and enormous publicly traded conglomerates like Viacom, which owns MTV, are poor patrons of ambitious, sophisticated,

Michael Bond Columbia Journalism Review looks at the breakdown of the wall separating news and advertising at the New York Times. In examples that range from Times articles about conferences that don’t mention the paper’s financial interest in them, to weekly meetings between section editors and the advertising department in order to find mutually-beneficial projects, Jeff Gerth explains why some journalists are concerned about the changing culture at the Times. Gerth notes that the publication’s 2014 “innovation report” recommended keeping advertising “walled off” from editorial. “Today, the paper is actively ignoring some of those recommendations,” he writes, “amid increasing