Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tim O’Brien has left his job as executive editor of the Huffington Post in order to work on historical fiction. O’Brien is now completing “the second installment of his five-book publishing deal." Meanwhile, Arianna Huffington took the opportunity to remind staffers that HuffPost maintains a strict "no book writing" policy. "The policy is that anybody starting a new book must either leave employment or take a sabbatical," a rep confirmed to New York Magazine.
Crime writer Patricia Cornwall has won almost $51 million in a lawsuit against her former financial-management company.
And speaking of crime and intrigue, a new James Bond novel written by William Boyd, will be released in the UK this fall.
The letters of Mark David Chapman, the man who shot and killed John Lennon in 1980, are going up for sale in Los Angeles this week. The highlight of the auction are four letters from Chapman to the police officer who arrested him detailing Chapman’s obsession with The Catcher in the Rye. "Have you read The Catcher in the Rye yet?" Chapman writes in one letter. "I would like you to read it and tell me what you think of it. As you remember, in the copy that was taken from me I had written 'This is my statement.'"
At The New Republic, Adam Kirsch argues that the rise of a certain kind of confessional, first-person writing—i.e. that of John Jeremiah Sullivan, Sheila Heti, Davy Rothbart, and Sloane Crosley—marks the evolution of the essay from a fixed literary genre to a kind of reality TV.
At the New Yorker’s Page Turner blog, Avi Steinberg makes a surprisingly compelling case that comedian Louis C.K. is a latter-day Gogol.
