Jean Stein. Photo: Brigitte Lacombe The New York Post reports that the woman who jumped to her death last weekend from an Upper East Side high rise was Jean Stein, author of Edie: American Girl and West of Eden. She was 83. Fox News co-president Bill Shine resigned yesterday. “A longtime lieutenant to its disgraced former chairman, Roger Ailes,” Shine “was viewed by some employees as a symbol of Fox News’s old-guard leadership,” according to the New York Times. With Shine leaving the company, Varietyreports that all eyes are on Sean Hannity. One source told the Daily Beast that
Chris Kraus On Friday, Bret Stephens’s debut op-ed in the New York Times, a column in which he defended some climate-change skeptics, infuriated environmentalists and “didn’t sit well with many of his colleagues in the newsroom.” Many Times readers have threatened to cancel their subscriptions. The Times has now released a statement from op-ed editor James Bennet, who states, “If all of our columnists and all of our contributors and all of our editorials agreed all of the time, we wouldn’t be promoting the free exchange of ideas, and we wouldn’t be serving our readers very well.” At the
President Barack Obama and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Photo: Pete Souza / White House Ta-Nehisi Coates is working on two new books. We Were Eight Years in Power, which will be released in October, was developed from Coates’s many articles on Barack Obama for The Atlantic. Coates is also working on a work of fiction, which is still in progress. Both books will be published by One World. Page Six reports that Colson Whitehead is working on a new book. “I am working on another depressing novel for the masses,” he said. “It takes place in Florida in the 1960s.” James
Ta-Nehisi Coates Granta has released their annual list of the best young American novelists, which includes Ottessa Moshfegh, Garth Risk Hallberg, Yaa Gyasi, and Emma Cline, among others. At The Guardian, Michelle Dean writes that “the list’s apparent lack of theme or consistency” is representative of post-Trump America. “Though the power and the strife of the country might be at the forefront of their minds, especially now, especially after November,” she writes, “I would be surprised if any novelist on this list thought of themselves as having articulated something about that big fractious concept known as ‘America.’” Barack Obama’s
William Gibson. Photo: Fred Armitage The standing committee of the US Senate Daily Press Gallery has decided not to move forward with Breitbart’s application for permanent press credentials. The website’s temporary passes will expire at the end of May. The committee was concerned about Breitbart’s many conflicts of interest inside the White House, as well as “the fact that Breitbart is now without a managing editor entirely.” In a statement, the website said that they are “unequivocally entitled to permanent Senate Press Gallery credentials and is determined to secure them.” The New York Times talks to science-fiction novelist William
Maylis de Kerangal Philippa Gregory has signed on to write four books with Touchstone. Three of the books will be a series of novels, following a British family from the seventeenth century to the twentieth century. Gregory’s fourth book will be a work of nonfiction that explores “the contributions of extraordinary, yet little-known women throughout the centuries, historically demonstrating women as agents of their own destinies.” The first book will be published in September 2019. The Huffington Post has a new name: HuffPost. Editor in chief Lydia Polgreen said the decision came from a desire to reflect “what our
Don DeLillo A Sense of Direction author Gideon Lewis-Kraus has written a fascinating story about an intellectual journal inspired by Trump. It began in February 2016 with the blog The Journal of American Greatness, described by its founders as the “first scholarly journal of radical #Trumpism.” JAG folded before the election, but when Trump won, the contributors were faced with a dliemma: “What would it even mean to form an intellectual vanguard in the service of his ideas? On the one hand, with Trump in power, they presumably felt they might be able to exert some influence. On the
Ijeoma Oluo. Photo: Julia-Grace Sanders The Man Booker International Prize shortlist was announced yesterday. Mathias Enard’s Compass, David Grossman’s A Horse Walks Into a Bar, Roy Jacobsen’s The Unseen, Dorthe Nors’s Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, Amos Oz’s Judas, and Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream are all finalists for the award. The winner will be announced in June. HBO is developing a TV movie of Fahrenheit 451. Michael B. Jordan and Michael Shannon have signed on to star. No release date has been set. Director John Waters answers questions for the New York Times’s “By the Book” column. When asked what he
Elif Shafak Co-owner of Washington, DC’s Politics Prose Bookstore and former Hillary Clinton speechwriter Lissa Muscatine will write a book about working with the Democratic presidential candidate. Hillaryland, which will be published by Penguin Press at an unspecified date, will detail “the 25-year journey of Hillary and her closest advisors at the intersection of politics and gender dynamics.” After a series of sexual harassment lawsuits came to light, Bill O’Reilly has been let go from Fox News. The New York Times writes that “his abrupt and embarrassing ouster ends his two-decade reign as one of the most popular and
Grace Paley. Photo: Dorothy Marder David Grann talks to Lit Hub about crime reporting, watching his books be turned into films, and his most recent work, Killers of the Flower Moon. The New York Times profiles Shannon Donnelly, the Palm Beach journalist who has covered Donald Trump since he purchased his Mar-a-Lago estate. Donnelly and Trump seem to share a mutual respect, although Trump’s animosity toward journalists can sometimes be taken out on Donnelly as well. After one unfavorable article, Trump wrote to her in 1996 with a deal: if she reigned in her coverage of him, he wrote,
Lindy West The New York Times’s Jim Rutenberg reports on the post-fact media from Russia, which he nicknames “the land of Alternative Truth Yet to Come.” After Trump launched an airstrike against Syria in response to Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons, some right-wing media figures in the US suggested that Assad’s attack was a “false flag” operation, instigated by rebel groups to trick the Trump administration into attacking the Syrian government. In Russia, Rutenberg writes, that conspiracy theory “was the dominant theme throughout the overwhelmingly state-controlled mainstream media.” At BuzzFeed, Nitasha Tiku looks at Mark Zuckerberg’s years-long campaign
Joseph O’Neill Pamela Paul—the editor of the New York Times Book Review and the author of the forthcoming My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues—explains why you should read books that you hate. Thomas McGuane—the author of 92 in the Shade, Panama, and most recently Crow Fair—reflects on his career just before receiving the The Los Angeles Times’s Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement. AmazonCrossing has become the biggest translator of foreign books into English. There are still spaces available in John Ashbery’s Home School, which will take place in late July and early August
Adam Haslett Adam Haslett talks to the LA Times about Imagine Me Gone, which has been nominated for the LA Times Book Prize. Haslett notes that the book drew on events from his own life, which made the writing process both painful and liberating. “Dwelling inside the minds of people that I knew that are suffering like that is not easy,” he said. “There’s just no question in my mind that I had a deeper sense of catharsis that I’ve ever had.” PBS Newshour anchor and managing editor Judy Woodruff will receive the 2017 Poynter Medal for Lifetime Achievement
James Baldwin. Photo: Allan Warren Bana Alabed, the seven-year-old Syrian girl known for tweeting about her life in Aleppo, will publish a memoir with Simon Schuster. Dear World will be released next fall. The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture has acquired James Baldwin’s archive. Director Kevin Young announced the news last night. “Even though it’s taken 30 years, it’s the perfect time,” he said. “It’s like he never left.” Baldwin’s drafts, manuscripts, and notes are all available to researchers, but his letters will not be available for another twenty years. Journalists at DNAinfo and Gothamist have decided
Hasan Minhaj The New Yorker’s Amy Davidson links United Airlines’s violent ejection of a passenger to failing American infrastructure. “Our ability to rely on getting from one place to the other,” she writes, “seems poised on a knife’s edge.” At Gizmodo, Adam Clark Estes calls for a boycott of the airline, citing their track record of poor customer service and public relations blunders. “Do you want to get beat up by a mercenary on your next flight? Of course you don’t,” Estes writes. “So stop flying United.” At Paste, Shane Ryan notes that United is just a manifestation of a
Margot Lee Shetterly. Photo: Megan Mendenhall The 2017 Pulitzer Prize winners were announced yesterday. Winners include the New Yorker’s Hilton Als for criticism, Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, and Heather Ann Thompson’s Blood in the Water. BuzzFeed news was a finalist in the competition for the first time, for an expose of arbitration strategies used by international companies. At the New Yorker, Rebecca Mead profiles Margaret Atwood. The two discuss witches, feminism, and why the 2016 election would make terrible fiction. “There are too many wild cards,” Atwood said. “You want me to believe that the F.B.I. stood up and said
Sam Lipsyte Almost immediately after the results of the 2016 US Presidential election were announced, Howard Jacobson, the British author whose book The Finkler Question won the Booker Prize, started writing a satire about Donald Trump. The novel, titled Pussy, will be released in England on April 13, and in the US in May. The Washington Post’s Ron Charles calls the novel a “ribald” and “grotesque fairy tale.” At Granta, Elif Batuman notes the importance of remembering the power imbalance that is often involved in travel writing (especially when the writer is from a “world-dominating superpower”), but also posits that
John Berger At n+1, Annie Julia Wyman reflects on the timelessness of John Berger’s writing. “He was a monument, a world of his own,” she writes. “His thinking and his art—which are the same thing—address themselves at once to the past, the present, and the future.” Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, have each signed deals with Flatiron Books. The reportedly $8 million deal includes two books from the former Vice President and a third that will be co-written with Jill Biden. Biden’s first book will be a memoir of the challenges he faced in his last year in
Imbolo Mbue. Photo: Kiriko Sano Gabriel Sherman reports that a third employee has joined the racial discrimination lawsuit against Fox News. Credit collections manager Monica Douglas said that the company knew about former comptroller Judy Slater’s behavior, but was told that “Slater will not be fired, because she knows too much.” Sherman’s TV miniseries about Fox’s Roger Ailes scandal, co-written with Tom McCarthy, has been picked up by Showtime. Naomi Klein is rushing to publish No Is Not Enough, her new book on the Trump administration, which she began writing last February. Although she usually spends “at least five