The New York Times reports that Penguin Random House’s deal to buy Simon & Schuster for $2.175 billion “is close to collapsing after Simon & Schuster’s parent company decided to allow the purchase agreement to expire.” The deal already faced a serious setback last month when a federal judge halted the sale on antitrust grounds.
New Yorker contributor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Jen Parker are creating a new magazine, Hammer & Hope, which will focus on Black politics and culture. From the publication’s Twitter page: “For those who care about the Black freedom struggle – the sign up is liveeeee!”
Following the success of BookTok, TikTok has decided to start selling books directly to users.
Novelist Fiona Maazel has started a new Substack newsletter titled Middle-aged and Out of Touch (“dispatches from the frontlines of ennui”).
Electric Literature editor-in-chief Denne Michele Norris has sold her debut novel to Random House. According to the publisher, When the Harvest Comes is “a young Black gay man reckoning with the death of his reverend father, who never accepted him.”
In the November episode of Artforum’s “Artists on Writers, Writers on Artists,” novelist James Hannaham (author of, most recently, Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta) and artist Nina Katchadourian “cover many subjects including what it’s like to observe and experience change—whether that’s the changes to a city, or to neighborhood. James talks about infusing fictions with the textures of real life, and Nina addresses what it means to survive the unsurvivable, asking questions about what humans are capable of living beyond, or living with.”