Early in his governorship, Andrew Cuomo invited Robert Caro, biographer of Lyndon B. Johnson and author of The Power Broker, to the state capitol to talk about Robert Moses. As it turned out, Cuomo did most of the talking, sharing his admiration of Moses and regaling the author with his plans to “build big,” Shane Goldmacher writes in the New York Times. The governor then declared the meeting over. “It was an arrogant and angering thing to do,” Mr. Caro recalled in an interview. “To think I had given a day of my life to have him lecture me.”
Michael M. Thomas—who wrote thrillers about the finance world and columns “about money and how people got it, what they did with it, and what it did to them”—has died.
At Gawker, Christian Lorentzen has written a review of n+1’s recent piece “Critical Attrition: What’s the Matter with Book Reviews?” The essay, writes Lorentzen, “is anti-intellectual in three ways: it’s sympathetic to lazy readers; by describing a couple of predicaments that bring about bad writing in book reviewing it validates those concerns and by implication lets those bad writers off the hook; and it indicts more ambitious form of criticism by presenting a bad-faith fictional version of that form’s worst examples. Excusing unambitious writing and discouraging ambitious writing is malpractice on the part of editors.”
Leslie Jamison has sold two new books, Splinters and Risk, to Little, Brown. According to Ben George of Little, Brown, Splinters is a “a blend of memoir and criticism exploring single motherhood in the wake of divorce, as well as the intertwining of parenting and art.” Risk is a novel about “the fraying marriage of a Brooklyn couple who permit themselves ever-escalating forms of sexual and emotional freedom in their relationship as a means of holding it together.”
John Darnielle—Mountain Goats singer-songwriter, Black Sabbath fan, and author—has sold his third novel, Devil House, to FSG’s MCD imprint. According to the publisher, the novel is about a true-crime novelist “as he grapples with the meaning of his work.” According to Darnielle, the book is about “stories and who gets to tell them.”