Poet, memoirist, and critic Meghan O’Rourke has been named the new editor of the Yale Review.
Molly Stern—who edited Michelle Obama’s Becoming, among many other successful titles—is leaving her job as publisher of Crown Books, apparently in response to the recent merging of Crown and Random House. David Drake, Crown’s executive VP, will fill Stern’s position.
Jon Krakauer has sued playwrights Nikos Tsakalakos and Janet Allard over their musical adaptation of his book Into the Wild. Krakauer originally granted the writers the right to use the title in their adaptation, but has now changed his mind after reading the play, and has requested that the writers not attach his book’s title or his name to their musical.
We are excited to learn the official publication dates of Benjamin Moser’s new biography of Susan Sontag (September 3, 2019) and of Caleb Crain’s second novel, Overthrow (August 27, 2019).
Novelist Marlon James, author of A Brief History of Seven Killings and the much-anticipated Black Leopard, Red Wolf, names his favorite books of 2018.
Serbian-American author Téa Obreht—whose debut, The Tiger’s Wife (2009), was a finalist for the National Book Award—has sold her novel Inland to Random House. According to the publisher, Inland is set in 1893 “in the lawless, drought-ridden lands of the Arizona Territory.”
Novelist Karan Mahajan (The Association of Small Bombs) interviews doctor and author Siddhartha Mukherjee, whose book The Emperor of Maladies won the Pulitzer Prize, about art, Indian identity, and the challenges of writing about medical science, about what we know and what we don’t know.
Tonight at the 92nd Street Y, Tyehimba Jess, who won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his book Olio, will introduce readings by three of his favorite poets—LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Douglas Kearney, and Tracie Morris—and read his own work. The event will culminate in a musical performance of Jess’s poetry.