Jessica Hopper. Photo: David Sampson Former House Speaker John Boehner is working on a memoir, Politico reports. Notes From a Smoke-Filled Room will cover Boehner’s Washington career and harkens back to “a bygone era when bipartisan deals were negotiated by party leaders behind closed doors rather than in front of the cameras and on Twitter—and when a politician’s habit for enjoying one too many glasses of expensive Merlot was indulged not excoriated.” The book will be published by Thomas Dunne Books in 2020. Merriam-Webster has chosen justice as their word of the year for 2018. “Young me kind of

Sam Lipsyte The Morning News is getting ready for its annual literary competition the Tournament of Books, in which a group of critics pit books directly against each other, with the winners moving ahead, bracket-style, until the final book is left standing. Competitions start in March, but the eighteen finalists that will compete, along with the judges, are listed here. The Paris Review has posted an entertaining and insightful Art of Fiction interview with Sam Lipsyte, author of the novels The Ask (2010) and Hark (which will be published in January). “I failed a lot. As a kid I

Tommy Orange In a letter posted on Literary Hub, Tin House publisher and editor in chief Win McCormack announced that the magazine will discontinue print editions after its twentieth anniversary issue is published next June. McCormack writes that the magazine will continue to publish online, and that money previously used for printing costs will be shifted to Tin House Books and the Tin House Workshop. “Twenty years feels like the right time to be stepping away and moving on to new adventures,” said editor Rob Spillman in a statement. “I look forward to focusing on other opportunities at the

James Alan McPherson New York magazine is unionizing with NewsGuild New York, joining other high-profile publications—including the New Yorker, Vice, and The Guardian—that have organized in recent years. Rebecca Traister, one of New York’s most popular writers, was happy about the effort: “The fact that the industry itself is moving back to collective bargaining is thrilling to me. This is what creates more stability and security for workers.” One of the magazine’s other marquee writers, Jonathan Chait, isn’t convinced it is a good idea, tweeting, “I spent hours talking to unions representatives. I came away from those conversations more,

Rowan Ricardo Phillips. Photo: Sue Kwon “In its highest forms, influence . . . derives from courage,” Time magazine editor Edward Felsenthal writes in his announcement of “The Guardians” as 2018’s Person of the Year. “Like all human gifts, courage comes to us at varying levels and at varying moments. This year we are recognizing four journalists and one news organization who have paid a terrible price to seize the challenge of this moment: Jamal Khashoggi, Maria Ressa, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, and the Capital Gazette of Annapolis, Md. They are representative of a broader fight by

R.O. Kwon. Photo: Smeeta Mahanti writes poet laureate Tracy K. Smith at the Times. “It has become a means of owning up to the complexity of our problems, of accepting the likelihood that even we the righteous might be implicated by or complicit in some facet of the very wrongs we decry.” At the New Yorker, Osita Nwanevu examines the misplaced mourning for the “old WASP aristocracy.” Teju Cole and Rowan Ricardo Phillips discuss tennis, talent, and Phillips’s new book, The Circuit. “Tennis is the perfect sport for late capitalism,” Phillips said. “I think people think that they’re escaping

Tyehimba Jess 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

Michelle Obama In their annual state of the media column, Mother Jones examines “the toxic combination of Facebook’s anti-democratic effect, Donald Trump’s authoritarian presidency, and the rise of a bolder class of propagandists,” which they write “is the story that in many ways defined this year, and will probably define the next two years too.” At Columbia Journalism Review, Jack Crosbie looks at the Charle Koch Institute’s Media and Journalism Fellowship, part of the Koch family’s attempt to rebrand “as a friend of the Fourth Estate.” In her “By the Book” interview, Michelle Obama discusses the Obama family book

Denis Johnson At The Point, Aaron Thier examines the themes of addiction, recovery, and god in Denis Johnson’s work. “Whatever ‘God’ meant to Johnson in his private life, ‘God’ in his fiction is a way of referring to those aspects of human experience that seem excessive or out of scale,” he writes. “It is the extra something—the charge that passes between a human being and the universe.” UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet has called for an international investigation into the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. New Republic editor J.J. Gould is leaving the magazine. Vulture’s Lila Shapiro looks

Tana French. Photo: Kathrin Baumbach Literary magazine A Public Space is starting a book publishing imprint. “If you’ve encountered any of the writers that have been published in the magazine, you know that it’s a place for discovery,” said founder Brigid Hughes “and the books are going to have that kind of identity as well.” A Public Space Books will release its first book next year. Call Me By Your Name author André Aciman is working on a sequel to the book. At BOMB, Francisco Cantú talks to John Moore about violence, storytelling, and his new photography book, Undocumented:

Margo Jefferson The City of New York has proposed designating the Strand bookstore’s building as a historical landmark. But current owner Nancy Bass Wyden is asking the city to reconsider their plans. Wyden says that the designation would strain the stores finances by making renovations and upkeep more costly, and that she has no plans to sell the building to developers. “The richest man in America, who’s a direct competitor, has just been handed $3 billion in subsidies. I’m not asking for money or a tax rebate,” Wyden said, referencing Amazon’s planned headquarters in Queens. “Just leave me alone.”

Justin Taylor The Washington Post’s book critic Carlos Lozada reads through George W.H. Bush’s books, letters, and diaries to imagine the memoir the ex-president “seemed to avoid.” Last week, the organizers of the Pushcart Prize—which honors writers who have published with small journals and independent presses—named this year’s nominees. Among them was Ailey O’Toole, who had been nominated for her poem “Gun Metal.” Now, poet Rachel McKibbens has posted on Twitter that O’Toole plagiarized a poem that appeared in McKibbens’s book blud. Here’s one of McKibbens’s lines: “Hell-spangled girl / spitting teeth into the sink, / I’d trace the

Anna Burns The majority of Mic’s one hundred employees were laid off yesterday as the company prepared to sell to Bustle Digital Group, Recode reports. The website’s two founders, Chris Altchek and Jake Horowitz, are the only staff that remain at the company. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company was sold for $5 million, far below the company’s previous valuation of $100 million. Columbia Journalism Review’s Mathew Ingram writes that Mic’s decision to pivot to video and their focus on a partnership with Facebook likely played a large role in the website’s decline. “But no one forced

Margaret Atwood Margaret Atwood has written a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. The new book, called The Testaments, takes place fifteen years after the conclusion of Handmaid’s, and is narrated by three women. “Everything you’ve ever asked me about Gilead and its inner workings is the inspiration for this book,” Atwood says in a video. “Well, almost everything: The other inspiration is the world we’ve been living in.” The new book will be released on September 10, 2019, by Doubleday/Nan A. Talese. A literature professor has discovered a forgotten cache of poet Anne Sexton’s early works. Written in the

Kiese Laymon At LitHub, Brandon Taylor talks to Kiese Laymon about family, trauma, and his new book, Heavy. “I thought I was initially writing a weight-loss memoir. I wrote that memoir. It was corny, sentimental and terrible. Then I wrote what I always wanted to write,” Laymon said. “I wanted to write a memoir that critiqued the American memoir, while playing with time, while directly addressing my mama, while talking about how words and sounds kept so many of our black southern selves alive and questioning, while refusing the trap of deliverance, while lifting up and looking under my

Rachel Kushner At Vulture, Aaron Sorkin writes about his experience adapting Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird for Broadway. Sorkin began the project three years ago, and the play premiered earlier this month after a lawsuit brought by Lee’s estate was settled. “I’ve been asked if I thought Harper Lee would like the play,” Sorkin writes. “My hope is that, if nothing else, Harper Lee would agree that the playwright had a deep love and respect for the book she wrote and that she’d be pleased (or maybe horrified) that the themes she wrote about in 1960 were at

Victor LaValle New York magazine in 2010: “I dream of an office in Washington where aides to senators and congressmen come in on their lunch hour and tell us stories.” In more Trump-publishing news, Cliff Sims, former special assistant to President Trump, has sold a memoir about his experiences with the president to St. Martin’s Press. It will be released in January 2019. On Friday at Bluestockings bookstore, Amy Scholder and Douglas A. Martin will join other writers to present Kathy Acker: The Last Interview, which is being released next week by Melville House Press.

Rachel Cusk. Photo: Adrian Clarke Lit Hub publishes a special recipe from Alice B. Toklas’s 1954 cookbook: “Haschich Fudge” (ie, hash brownies). As Toklas explained, “This is the food of Paradise—of Baudelaire’s Artificial Paradises: it might provide an entertaining refreshment for a Ladies’ Bridge Club or a chapter meeting of the DAR.” Happy Holidays! The New York Times has released its list of “100 Notable Books of 2018.” The group will be whittled down to ten at an event the morning of November 29th. Among the selected titles were Sigred Nunez’s The Friend (which also recently picked up a

Ron Chernow. Photo: Beowulf Sheehan Grant author Ron Chernow will headline the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner next year. “Freedom of the press is always a timely subject and this seems like the perfect moment to go back to basics,” Chernow said in a statement. “While I have never been mistaken for a stand-up comedian, I promise that my history lesson won’t be dry.” Former White House aide and Trump campaign staffer Cliff Sims is writing a book about the Trump administration. Team of Vipers, which reportedly received a seven-figure advance from publisher Thomas Dunne Books, will be available

Michelle Obama’s memoir Becoming sold more than 725,000 units on November 13, the day of its release. This is the biggest release-day sales total for any book published in the US in 2018. Maya Jasanoff, the author of The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World, has won the 2018 Cundill History Prize. Ann Powers, the author of Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music, is working on a book about Joni Mitchell, title TBD. The Pulitzer board has announced that fiction writer Junot Diaz will remain one of its members.