Jacqueline Woodson. Photo: Marty Umans The husband of Labour Party politician Jo Cox, who was murdered last summer, will publish a memoir about her life. Brendan Cox said that the book was difficult to write, but “in an era of growing hatred and division I wanted to tell the story of someone who brought love and empathy to everyone she met.” Jo Cox: More in Common will be published by Two Roads on June 15. The New York Times profiles Turkish novelist Asli Erdogan, who was imprisoned for six months and is now living with her mother in Istanbul

Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie. Photo: Chris Boland Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan announced her next novel today. Manhattan Beach follows Anna Kerrigan, “the Brooklyn Navy Yard’s only female driver,” and her mafia-boss father during World War II. The book will be published by Scribner in October. Fox News anchor Heather Nauert has been named State Department spokeswoman, becoming the second staffer from the network to be hired at the agency. Nauert was most recently on Fox Friends, a “program that is one of Trump’s favorites.” The Huffington Post looks into The Camp of the Saints, the 1973 French novel often referred

Tina Brown At The Atlantic, Adrienne LaFrance explores the timing of the contemporary news cycle, asking, “Why Do the Big Stories Keep Breaking at Night?” A book based on the diaries Tina Brown kept during her eight years as editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair will be published in November. Brown, who was head of the magazine from 1984 to 1992, says that when she revisited the journals, she “rediscovered how madcap those days were—how chancy, how new, how supercharged.” Henry Holt publisher Stephen Rubin assures readers that the book will have plenty of juicy gossip, promising that Brown will “spill

Katie Kitamura. Photo: Sophie Fiennes. The Evergreen Review has been reborn as an online publication. The legendary magazine, which was started in 1957 by Barney Rosset and folded in 1973, published works by the likes of Samuel Beckett, William S. Burroughs, Susan Sontag and many other notable contributors. The new version is headed by editor-in-chief Dale Peck and published by John Oakes of OR Books. Peck says he plans to make the revived magazine “an international forum for un-sayable things.” ABC News president James Goldston has reacted to a petition signed by more than two-hundred ABC staffers, calling on

Michelle and Barack Obama Barack and Michelle Obama have sold the world rights to their forthcoming books to Penguin Random House. The deal was made after an intense bidding war in which offers from Penguin, HarperCollins, Macmillan, and Simon Schuster reportedly went over $60 million, with the times reporting that the number “stretched well into eight figures.” Although the amount has yet to be confirmed, it will likely be a historic amount for memoirs from a president and first lady—Bill and Hillary Clinton’s post-presidency books sold for a combined $18 million. The Times notes that President Obama’s memoir “could

August Wilson Former Boston Globe theater critic Patti Hartigan has signed on to write a biography of August Wilson. Hartigan talked to the New York Times about the difficulty of capturing all aspects of the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright in a single book. “I want it to be a legacy biography and a literary biography,” Hartigan said. “I want it to show him as a human being and an artist. But I don’t have 2,000 pages.” The tentatively-titled August Wilson: The Kiln in Which He Was Fired will be published in 2019 by 37 INK, an imprint of Atria Books.

Eileen Myles The New York Public Library has announced the finalists for this year’s Helen Bernstein Book Award, which honors journalistic works of nonfiction. Nominees include Gary Younge’s Another Day in the Death of America, Jane Mayer’s Dark Money, and Charlotte McDonald-Gibson’s Cast Away. The winner will be announced in May. Walter Mosley will release a new novel with Mullholland Books, an imprint of Little, Brown. Down the River Unto the Sea follows a Brooklyn private investigator as he investigates “the case of a Black civil rights activist convicted of murdering two city policemen.” The book will be published

Clive James Poet and critic Clive James will publish a sequel to his 2015 short-poem collection, Sentenced to Life. Written after a diagnosis of leukemia, his first book was a reflection on death. But James says that his upcoming book, Injury Time, will be much more upbeat. “When I wrote Sentenced to Life, everyone thought I was dying,” he told The Guardian. “But the new drugs are working and the danger now is that I’ll bore everyone to death.” Injury Time will be published by Picador in May. Brooklyn Magazine talks to Roxane Gay about success, Twitter, and pulling

Helen Oyeyemi. Photo: Tom Pilston PEN America has announced most of their 2017 Literary Award winners. Helen Oyeyemi’s What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours won the Open Book Award, and Matthew Desmond’s Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City won for nonfiction. Winners of the other prizes will be announced at the end of March. The Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalists were announced yesterday. Nominees include Zadie Smith’s Swing Time, Emma Cline’s The Girls, Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs To You, and Frances Wilson’s Guilty Thing. The Daily Beast has hired conservative journalist Lachlan Markay as White

Tom Hanks More than sixty writers and artists have signed an open letter from PEN America to President Trump denouncing his executive order on immigration. Signatories include Zadie Smith, Philip Roth, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, among others. “Not only will such a policy prevent great artists from performing,” the letter states, “but it will constrict the interchange of important ideas, isolating the U.S. politically and culturally.” Most of the writers and artists who signed the letter are less than hopeful that it will have any effect on the president. Novelist Jeffrey Eugenides compared the letter to “shouting into a void.”

Liane Moriarty. Photo: Nic Walker After outrage last weekend over a recent video showing Milo Yiannopoulos speaking positively about pedophelia, the Breitbart editor’s book with Simon Schuster imprint Threshold was cancelled. Yiannopoulos had already pushed the release date to June so that he could include a chapter on the outrage his book deal generated. In a short statement, the company wrote, “After careful consideration, Simon Schuster and its Threshold Editions imprint have cancelled publication of Dangerous by Milo Yiannopoulos.” In addition to his cancelled book, Yiannopoulos’s comments might also have put him on the outs with Breitbart. Washingtonian reports

Neil Gaiman Neil Gaiman announced that he is currently working on a sequel to his novel, Neverwhere, twenty years after it was first published. Gaiman said that Neverwhere “was this glorious vehicle where I could talk about huge serious things and have a ridiculous amount of fun on the way.” Now, he says that his work with refugees and observations of the world around him made him feel “that it actually was time to do something.” The sequel, The Seven Sisters, does not have a confirmed release date. The New York Times reports that Michael Dubke has been hired

Mark Zuckerberg This year’s PEN World Voices Festival will focus on “gender and power in the age of President Trump.” The festival usually highlights a country or continent, but PEN America executive director Suzanne Nossel said that the current political situation necessitated a topic change. “Amid visa bans and an America First foreign policy,” she said, “PEN World Voices is now an important antidote to an America at risk of only talking to itself, fanning baseless fears, and damaging relations with allies around the world.” The 2017 festival take place in New York during the first week of May.

Philip Pullman Philip Pullman announced a new trilogy, “The Book of Dust.” The still-untitled first installment follows Lyra Belacqua, the heroine of his first series, “His Dark Materials,” and will be published in October. Jessica Jones actress Krysten Ritter has written a novel. Her psychological thriller, Bonfire, will be published in November by Crown Archetype. In the wake of Michael Flynn’s resignation, President Trump, as well as his main right-wing media supporters, have avoided discussing the administration’s ties to Russia and focused instead on the leaks themselves. Trump took to Twitter to say that “the real scandal here is that

George Saunders New York magazine has signed a four-book deal with Simon Schuster. The first, which will celebrate the magazine’s fiftieth anniversary with a collection of covers and photographs from previous issues, will be published next November. Banned Twitter-user Milo Yiannopoulos has delayed the publication of his forthcoming memoir, Dangerous, in order to include his thoughts on the uproar over his book deal and the recent protests against him at multiple college campuses in the US. The book will now be published in June. The White House has granted press credentials to Lucian Wintrich of Gateway Pundit, a right-wing

Naomi Klein Naomi Klein is joining The Intercept as a senior correspondent, focusing on the “shocks of the Trump era.” In her announcement, editor in chief Betsy Reed explained, “No one is better than Naomi Klein at exposing the hidden agendas of disaster capitalists and their agents in government.” Associated Press photographer Burhan Ozbilici’s coverage of the assassination of Russia’s ambassador to Turkey has been awarded the 2017 World Press Photo of the Year, as well as the top prize for the spot news category. But Stuart Franklin, the chair of the World Press Photo award jury, wrote in

Amy Chozick Marshall Project editor Bill Keller talks to the Columbia Journalism Review about the website’s recent Ellie win for “general excellence,” rebuilding trust in the media, and how the Trump administration might affect criminal justice reform. Keller says that the website’s response to the current president’s “law and order” platform includes increased immigration and deportation coverage, which he says “could well be the criminal justice story of the year—a massive mobilization of law enforcement, a push to essentially deputize police and sheriffs as immigration enforcers, huge dockets at understaffed immigration courts.” At Wired, Gabriel Snyder looks at the

Javier Marias The Trump administration is struggling to fill the role of communications director. Press Secretary Sean Spicer took over the role after Jason Miller, the communications director for the Trump campaign, backed out before inauguration. Steve Schmidt, a former member of the George W. Bush administration and John McCain’s campaign runner, talked to Politico about why the president is having trouble filling a “normally coveted” job. “The communications director job in the White House has always functioned as . . . building and maintaining public approval for the president’s policies,” he said. “When you look at the complete

Stephen Sondheim Citing the Daily Mail’s “reputation for poor fact checking, sensationalism and flat-out fabrication,”  editors at Wikipedia have voted to remove the paper from its list of “reliable sources.” Articles from Russia Today and Fox News are still acceptable. BuzzFeed talks to the team behind Merriam-Webster’s newly-political Twitter account, which has become a social media sensation after it began tweeting definitions of words and concepts that the current administration doesn’t quite seem to understand. “Anyone who spends their life sifting through how language is used also has to sift through history, and how words have been used at

Salman Rushdie Jonathan Cape has announced a new novel by Salman Rushdie that will cover the last eight years of US politics. The Golden House tells the story of an “American filmmaker whose involvement with a secretive, tragedy-haunted family teaches him how to become a man,” and will incorporate numerous recent political events and trends, including the inauguration of Barack Obama, the rise of the Tea Party, Gamergate, debates about identity politics, and “the insurgence of a ruthlessly ambitious, narcissistic, media-savvy villain sporting makeup and coloured hair.” The book will be released in September. Senator Elizabeth Warren will write a book