Greta Thunberg, the teen Swedish activist who was a driving force behind this month’s climate demonstrations, has signed a two-book deal with Penguin Press: No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference, a book of speeches, and Our House Is on Fire, a memoir.
Cormac McCarthy has some ideas about “how to write a great science paper.” Among the tips Nature magazine gathered from the Blood Meridian novelist: “Use minimalism to achieve clarity. While you are writing, ask yourself: is it possible to preserve my original message without that punctuation mark, that word, that sentence, that paragraph or that section? Remove extra words or commas whenever you can.”
The president has written that Peter Baker of the New York Times is an “Obama lover” and a “Trump hater” and “should not even be able to write about me.” As Carlos Lozada notes, Trump skips over Baker’s credentials: The journalist has written extensively about Russia (with Susan Glasser, he wrote the book Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the End of Revolution), and also contributed a chapter on Bill Clinton in the book Impeachment: An American History.
Knopf has announced that it will publish the second novel by Yaa Gyasi, author of Homegoing. The new book, Transcendent Kingdom, “is the story of a family from Ghana that struggles to assimilate to small-town life in Alabama.” It is scheduled for release in July 2020.
Tonight at the Poetry Project, Chris Kraus and Robert Dewhurst will host a tribute to David Rattray, whose 1992 book How I Became One of the Invisible is being reissued this month. Fiona Duncan, Ken Jordan, Basil King, Martha King, Eileen Myles, George Quasha, and others will read and discuss Rattray’s work and continuing influence.