Zinzi Clemmons Liveright has announced plans to publish two volumes of Nelson Mandela’s correspondence from prison. The first volume, with 250 selected letters and a foreword by Mandela’s granddaughter, will be published in July 2018, and a second volume will be published in 2019. Sarah Jessica Parker has acquired the first manuscript for her literary fiction imprint, SJP. A Place for Us, a debut novel by Fatima Farheen Mirza, “tackles issues of belonging and tradition, delving into the complex experience of an immigrant family in the United States.” BuzzFeed has an excerpt of Zinzi Clemmons’s hotly anticipated debut novel, What

Sherman Alexie. Photo: Chase Jarvis Daniel Weiss, the president and chief executive of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has sold a book to Public Affairs. The still-untitled work examines “America’s experience in the Vietnam era.” Olympic gymnast Aly Raisman is working on a memoir for Little, Brown. Fierce: How Competing for Myself Changed Everything will be published next november. Jailed literary critic and Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo has been transferred from prison to a hospital after he was diagnosed with liver cancer. Activist Hu Jia called the news “a political murder” and noted that Liu’s eleven-year sentence likely contributed

Chuck Klosterman For Pride week, the New York Times has assembled a twenty-year timeline of LGBTQ lit. Karen Rinaldi, a senior vice president of Harper Collins and the author of the novel The End of Men, ponders the difference between writing and editing. For years, editing was her profession, something she saw as a service to writers: “The task is both monastic and intimate—we edit in silence in order to listen to the voice of the writer—and the skilled editor must suspend not only ego, but inner voice as well, to make room for another’s.” But when she became

Chris Kraus Former United States Attorney Preet Bharara is writing a book. Bharara, who was fired by Donald Trump earlier this year, said the book will be “about integrity, leadership, decision making and moral reasoning.” The still-untitled work will be published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2019. MIT Press is partnering with the Internet Archive to digitize their backlist titles. The e-books will then be available at any library that already lends physical copies of the titles. The Millions talks to Lidia Yuknavitch about her 2011 memoir, The Chronology of Water. At the Paris Review, Albert Mobilio reflects on

Emma Straub Simon Schuster imprint Gallery Books is publishing a new memoir by a former White House writer for Barack Obama. Pat Cunnane’s West Winging It: An Unpresidential Memoir will be published in June 2018 and has already been optioned for television. Slate’s Jessica Winter has been hired as the New Yorker’s website executive editor. Other new hires at the site include Public Books’s Liz Maynes-Aminzade as senior web manager and the New York Times’s Soo-Jeong Kang as executive video producer. At the Times, University of Pittsburgh professor and MacArthur fellow Terrance Hayes has been hired as the New

Zadie Smith The New York Times has hired Kathleen Kingsbury as deputy editorial page editor. Kingsbury was most recently the digital managing editor at the Boston Globe, and will start at the Times in August. BuzzFeed has released a secret government report that shows Chelsea Manning’s intelligence leaks were “largely insignificant and did not cause any real harm to US interests.” Sue Halpern reviews Risk, Laura Poitras’s new documentary on Julian Assange. Although the film was initially conceived as a “hero’s journey,” in the end Assange’s many contradictions turned the film into “something more critical, complicated, and at best

Marlon James. Photo: Jeffrey Skemp Marlon James reflects on racism in Minnesota after the police officer who shot and killed Philando Castile was found not guilty. James refers to an article in Ebony by Dick Gregory, in which the comedian wrote, “Down South white folks don’t care how close I get as long as I don’t get too big. Up North white folks don’t care how big I get as long as I don’t get too close.” “I should have known that a man as wise as Gregory meant so much more. And I did not realize until just now,

Andrew O’Hagan The literary organization PEN has announced that it will grant novelist Margaret Atwood—author of more than forty books, including The Handmaid’s Tale—a lifetime achievement award. The Brooklyn Book Festival, which will take place on September 17, has released a partial list of authors who will participate this year. Among the writers who will read from their work or participate in roundtable discussions are: Colson Whitehead, Elif Batuman, Chris Hayes, Jacqueline Woodson, Lois Lowry, Erna Brodber, Santiago Gamboa, Young-ha Kim, and Hisham Matar. According to organizers, this year’s festival will pay special attention to topics such as reporting

Victor LaValle CNN has filed a lawsuit against the FBI in order to obtain copies of James Comey’s memos on his meetings with Trump. Although the documents are not classified, the FBI has yet to answer the network’s FOIA request. At Literary Hub, Marc Leeds looks to Kurt Vonnegut for hope during the Trump presidency. “Kurt Vonnegut tells us that the game will always be stacked against the individual, and that everyone deserves common decency simply for making an effort at living,” he writes. “When Trump and his regressive minions retreat from the scene, we will all have to

Tracy K. Smith. Photo: Rachel Eliza Griffiths Tracy K. Smith has been named poet laureate by the Library of Congress. Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden said that Smith was chosen for her ability to make weighty issues accessible through poetry. “These aren’t simple poems,” she said, “but they are direct, and you can get into them based on your experience.” In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Smith said that she hoped to use the role to transcend the country’s political polarization. “We’re so much more important to one another as individuals . . . than we are

Bob Dylan The New York Times offers a thoughtful response to Delta Airlines and Bank of America’s decision to pull financial backing from a new Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar, which bestows the title dictator with Trumpian qualities. In withdrawing their financial support, the two companies “have proved more sensitive than even Queen Elizabeth I. ‘I am Richard II, know ye not that?’ she famously remarked around 1601. Yet the queen pointedly refused to pull her support for Shakespeare’s company, which continued to perform at court, or even for that play, though Richard II had been

Julie Buntin Actor Leslie Odom Jr., who won a Tony award last year for playing Aaron Burr in Lin Manuel-Miranda’s Hamilton, has signed a book deal with Macmillan imprint Feiwel Friends. Failing Up: How to Rise Above, Do Better, and Never Stop Learning will be published in March 2018. Manuel-Miranda’s musical has been a reliable producer of robust book sales: Ron Chernow’s biography of Hamilton, which the show was based on, and Hamilton: The Revolution, the musical’s libretto and a behind-the-scenes look at its creation, have both spent long stretches on the best-seller list. Montana Congressman Greg Gianforte has

Barbara Browning. Photo: Kari Orvik NPR has been investigating the deaths of journalists David Gilkey and Zabihullah Tamanna, who were ambushed last year in southern Afghanistan. Gilkey and Tamanna appear to have been the victims of a targeted strike: “The two men were not the random victims of bad timing in a dangerous place, as initial reports indicated. Rather, the journalists’ convoy was specifically targeted by attackers who had been tipped off to the presence of Americans in Afghanistan’s Helmand province.” The New York Times has twice altered the headline on a profile of NBC News correspondent Katy Tur

Walter Mosley. Photo: David Shankbone The diplomatic crisis between Qatar and its neighboring Gulf states has put pressure on the Qatari government to shut down Al Jazeera, or significantly curtail the new organization’s editorial independence. Saudi Arabia has canceled Al Jazeera’s broadcasting license and ordered the company to close its offices in the country. The organization’s website was also the victim of a cyberattack. The New York Times attempts to identify which part of their February report on contacts between Trump advisers and Russian intelligence officials was inaccurate, after former FBI director James Comey testified that the story was

Denis Johnson Naomi Alderman’s The Power has won the Baileys Prize for Women’s Fiction. Her book, which is set in a future world “where women and girls can kill men with a single touch,” is the first science fiction work to win the prize. The New York Timestalks to Alan Pasqua, the pianist whose “jazzy piano chords” accompanied Bob Dylan’s Nobel lecture. Pasqua had played piano on two of Dylan’s albums in the 1970s, but had not performed with the Nobel laureate since. When he first heard from Dylan’s manager about the accompaniment, Pasqua did not know it would

Aaron Cantú At Vulture, David Edelstein responds to criticism of his review of Wonder Woman, which some readers found superficial and offensive. Although Edelstein writes that some of his words were taken out of context, he notes that others were simply not clear to readers. “To have to unpack my descriptions means, in the end, that they weren’t good or nuanced or sensitive enough to their ramifications,” he writes. “The lesson was learned on that score—and plenty of others.” Milo Yiannopoulos will self-publish his book, Dangerous, which was dropped by Simon Schuster earlier this year. After the book was

Bob Dylan Bill Maher has apologized after using a racial slur during an interview with Republican Senator Ben Sasse. HBO called the comment “inexcusable and tasteless,” and said they will edit the remark out of future broadcasts. In response, Senator Al Franken has canceled an upcoming appearance on the show. Ben Smith talks to former New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan about the paper’s decision to discontinue the role. Sewanee Review editor Adam Ross talks about the magazine’s struggle to stay relevant in the digital age. Ross had been in the middle of writing a new novel when

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Book Reviews: The Diversity of Race, Ethnicity and Sexual Orientation, and took note of “a different feel” (smaller, but still relevant) at this year’s convention. “People say, if all you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail. We should be so lucky. President Trump has a hammer, but all he’ll use it for is to smash things that others have built, as the world looks on in wonder and in fear.” Environmental activist and author Bill McKibben—the author of Oil and Honey and Earth—offers a clear and eloquent rebuttal of Trump’s decision to

Maria Semple Julia Roberts will star in the television adaptation of Maria Semple’s Today Will be Different. Semple is currently writing a limited series based on the book for HBO. Scholars have discovered a new play by Edith Wharton in a Texas archive. “The Shadow of a Doubt” was written and produced in 1901, long before Wharton began writing novels. At the New York Times, Holland Cotter reviews the Morgan Library and Museum’s exhibition on Henry David Thoreau. “As you go through the show it becomes clear how important it is to have him present, right now,” Cotter writes.

Chris Kraus The New York Times is offering another round of buyouts in the newsroom in the hopes of avoiding forced layoffs. The paper plans to merge the current system of copy editors and “backfielders” into a single group. The Times is also eliminating the public editor role, currently held by Liz Spayd. In a memo, publisher Arthur Sulzberger noted that the public editor position was poorly suited to the digital age. “Today, our followers on social media and our readers across the internet have come together to collectively serve as a modern watchdog, more vigilant and forceful than