Francesco Pacifico Francesco Pacifico talks to Adam Thirlwell about translating his his new novel, Class. Pacifico is translating the new book into English himself, which he says has given him a chance to rewrite the original. “I’d gained enough distance from Class to realize the Italian version hadn’t been properly edited—there were a lot of moral asperities that I had to tone down because it was a crazily bleak book,” he said. “Now my Italian editor and I think we should publish the new version as a paperback.” At Hazlitt, Elizabeth Strout discusses politics, stand-up comedy, and her new

Al Franken At the New Yorker, Jill Lepore looks at a new (and newly relevant) batch of dystopian novels. In his new book, Giant of the Senate, Al Franken recalls likening Ted Cruz to “a Carnival cruise” (and noting that both are “full of shit”). Cruz has responded: “Al is trying to sell books and apparently he’s decided that being obnoxious and insulting me is good for causing liberals to buy his books… I wish him all the best.” Philip Pullman has offered a glimpse of his forthcoming novel The Book of Dust, which is meant to serve as

Denis Johnson The Castle will be released on June 26. The New York Timesdetails the increasingly violent treatment of journalists in the first months of Trump’s presidency. After Republican Congressman Greg Gianforte body-slammed a reporter the night before his election, the Timesasks, “In this time of intense partisanship, shiv-in-the-kidney politics and squabbles over the meaning of truth, can Americans come together and agree that a politician slamming a journalist to the ground for asking a question is wrong? The answer, it turns out, is no.” At Electric Literature, Rebecca Makkai reviews the new American Writers Museum in Chicago, and

Maggie Haberman Amazon’s first bookstore in New York opens today at Columbus Circle. The “physical extension of Amazon.com” uses customer behavior to choose which books to stock. “We incorporate data about what people read, how they read it and why they read it,” said Amazon Books vice president Jennifer Cast. The New York Times reports that reactions to the new store are conflicted. “I’m happy there’s a new store where people can see books and encounter them, but I’d rather we were in there,” said Book Culture owner Chris Doeblin. “If I had the money, I would go and

Phong Bui Over a dozen staff and board members resigned from the Brooklyn Rail late last week. Although the departing editorial team has not commented on their reasons for leaving, cofounder and current artistic director Phong Bui told ArtNet that the departures were necessary for the future of the magazine. “It’s like a marriage that that has gone wrong,” he said. “It is better that the father and the mother part ways.” Elisabeth Moss is working on a television adaptation of Mary Beth Keane’s novel Fever, which tells the story of Typhoid Mary. Moss will produce and star in

Jann Wenner. Photo: Albert Chau Journalist Joe Hagan is writing a biography of Rolling Stone founding editor Jann Wenner. The book will be based on interviews with Wenner and his many celebrity friends, including Mick Jagger, Yoko Ono, and Bruce Springsteen. Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine will be published by Knopf next October. LitHub talks to Ian Buruma, the incoming editor of the New York Review of Books. “A jewel has been dropped into my lap,” he said of his new job. “My task is to keep it bright and shining.”

Guy Trebay The PEN Center USA has named its new board members: The Black List founder Franklin Leonard, author David L. Ulin, Coast magazine editor Samantha Dunn, and author-filmmaker Amir Soltani. Politico ponders the question: “Should the Washington Post have withheld sensitive details about an ISIS bomb plot” when it broke the story that President Trump had revealed classified information to the Russians? The Ringer includes Dennis Lim’s critical study David Lynch: The Man from Another Place on its helpful list of films, music, and books to revisit in anticipation of the premiere of the new season of Twin

Heather Dietrick. Photo: Victor Jeffreys The Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard has released an analysis of news coverage of Trump’s first one hundred days in office. The report found that Trump received three times as much news coverage as previous presidents in their first months in office, and that the overwhelmingly negative attention set “a new standard for unfavorable press coverage of a president.” Trump is considering a decrease in the amount of time Press Secretary Sean Spicer spends on camera. Sources told Politico that “the briefings have become one of the most dreaded

Ian Buruma Ian Buruma has been named the editor of the New York Review of Books. Buruma has been contributing to the magazine since the 1980s, and is taking over for founding editor Robert Silvers, who died earlier this year. The Walrus editor Jonathan Kay has resigned after “expressing dismay” over the departure of Write magazine editor Hal Niedzviecki, who stepped down last week amid criticism of his recent column on cultural appropriation. On Twitter, Kay wrote that while he did not object to Niedzviecki’s firing, he did object to “the shaming, the manifestos, the creepy confession rituals.” In

Tina Brown The Guardian examines Facebook’s new tools for debunking fake news, and finds that they may be having the opposite effect. After the fact-checking system labeled an article about Irish slavery as fake news, readers of the article increased rather than decreased. Christian Winthrop, editor of the website that published the article, said that the “disputed” label actually encouraged free-speech proponents to share the article more widely: “A bunch of conservative groups grabbed this and said, ‘Hey, they are trying to silence this blog—share, share, share.” The Bay Area News Group reports that Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle

Gary Younge The shortlist for the 2017 Orwell Prize for political writing was announced yesterday. Honorees include Tim Shipman’s All Out War, John Bew’s Citizen Clem, and Gary Younge’s Another Day in the Death of America. The winner will be announced next month. New York Times deputy publisher A.G. Sulzberger will now be in charge of the paper’s opinion section, which was previously run by his father, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. After the tronc-owned Chicago Tribune announced plans to buy the Chicago Sun-Times, the Department of Justice has opened an antitrust investigation into possible acquisition. BuzzFeed has revealed Tablet

Jennifer Egan. Photo: Pieter M. van Hattem The New York Times reports on the literary agents who are vying for former FBI director James Comey’s story. Although most government officials usually move on to corporate jobs or teaching positions, Comey’s firing may make some employers wary of hiring him. But the controversy could land him a lucrative book deal. “I don’t know what his next job will be,” said Trident Media Group chairman Robert Gottlieb, “but I can tell you there is a really big book in Comey if Comey wants to write about the facts.” Wikileaks is offering

Samuel R. Delany At the Barnes and Noble Review, Patricia Lockwood talks about her new memoir, Priestdaddy. The book is about her father, a Catholic priest who got a pass on the celibacy rule from the Vatican because he was a married Lutheran minister before converting (Lockwood calls her existence a “human loophole”). In a New York Times review, Dwight Garner writes that “Lockwood’s prose is cute and dirty and innocent and experienced, Betty Boop in a pas de deux with David Sedaris.” Vice is launching a new project, News Issues, a semi-regular digital magazine that takes on a single

Kathy Acker. Photo by Michel Delsol. Book Expo America—the publishing-world convention that will take place this year in New York City May 31 through June 2—has announced that Hillary Clinton will appear on its main stage on Thursday, June 1. “An Evening with Hillary Clinton” will showcase the former Secretary of State’s many books, including a new edition of her bestselling book It Takes a Village. Clinton’s next book will be released in September by Simon Schuster. At Vulture, Christian Lorentzen walks readers through Granta’s latest volume in their Best of Young American Novelists series. The collection, the third since

Emmanuel Macron Journalist Adam Plowright is working on a biography of French president-elect Emmanuel Macron. The French Exception: Emmanuel Macron’s Extraordinary Rise and Risk will be published by Icon Books in September in the UK. The Times’s David Leonhardt looks at the recent hacking attack on then-candidate Macron, and sees the situation as a lesson for American journalists. Compared to reporting on Clinton’s emails, Leonhardt writes, “France’s mainstream media showed how to exercise better judgement.” Rachel Donadio explains why the email leak didn’t influence the election. She attributes the muted effect of Macron’s email dump to the fact that

Curtis Sittenfeld Bill Clinton and James Patterson are teaming up to write a novel set in the White House. The President is Missing, which will be filled with “details that only a President can know,” is scheduled for a June 2018 release by Alfred A. Knopf and Hachette. After publishing an article exploring the arguments for “transracialism” last March, Professor Rachel Tuvel “is now bearing the brunt of a massive internet witch-hunt,” writes Jesse Signal in New York. The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf looks at “call-out culture” on college campuses. Friedersdorf talks to undergraduates from colleges across the country, all

Jessa Crispin The De-Canon Project, a “pop-up library” that showcases work by artists of color, has started building a new archive of texts in which writers of color (including Cathy Park Hong, Junot Diaz, and Charles Johnson) discuss craft. As Neil Aitken writes, “A few weeks ago I was thinking about how Junot Diaz often comments on the fact he’s almost never asked to speak about craft, and instead always is asked to talk about race, identity, and the immigrant experience. And it’s true—when I think about all the books on writing craft I’ve read or heard about over

Bob Mankoff. Photo: Davina Pardo Shattered, the recent book about Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaign by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, may become a TV miniseries. TriStar Television has purchased the rights to the book, although a network has not yet been found. After reporter Chris Villani was suspended without pay for tweeting without editor approval, staff of the Boston Herald staff are boycotting Twitter entirely. According to the paper’s union, the social media policy has been in place since 2013, but this is the first time it has been used to discipline an employee. In a statement, the

April Ryan The first plans for Barack Obama’s presidential library in Chicago were unveiled yesterday. Designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, the library will include classrooms, an auditorium, and a public garden. In his announcement, Obama said that the campus-like design was chosen to “create an institution that will train the next generation of leadership.” White House reporter April Ryan has been named the National Association of Black Journalists’ Journalist of the Year. “In the White House press corps circle, where too few black women have been given an opportunity to report, April has excelled and persevered in

Pamela Paul Tor Books has created a new imprint. Tor Labs will “emphasize experimental approaches to genre publishing.” The imprint’s first project will be an audiodrama, Steal the Stars, that will air in a weekly podcast beginning next August. Page Six reports that Tucker Carlson has signed a $9 million, two-book deal with Threshold Editions, the Simon Schuster imprint. Both books are “current events-oriented, provocative and funny.” Even after Sean Hannity called an all-staff meeting to announce that he had no plans to leave Fox News, network insiders are still expecting more organizational turmoil. The New York Daily News