In light of events in Charleston, Random House has decided to move the publication date of Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s forthcoming book on race, bringing it out in July rather than September. “We started to feel pregnant with this book,” the executive editor of the Spiegel & Grau imprint said. “We had this book that so many people wanted.” They’d previously discussed publishing early during the protests following the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, but the book had not been ready then. “I’ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died,” Toni Morrison apparently wrote this week in response to the publisher’s blurb request. “Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates.”
Reason.com editor Nick Gillespie describes receiving a grand jury subpoena for identifying information on commenters who’d expressed anger toward the judge in the recent Silk Road case—and then a gag order preventing him from discussing it all.
At the New York Times, public editor Margaret Sullivan responds to the mockery and complaints the paper has come in for following their announcement of TV critic Alessandra Stanley’s new beat covering the “top 1 percent of the 1 percent.” Dean Baquet is quoted as assuring us that, whatever Twitter might think, the beat “will not be ‘isn’t it cool to be rich.’”
The Argentine writer Pablo Katchadjian, who faced a lawsuit from the widow of Jorge Luis Borges for his 2009 small-press experiment El Aleph engordado (The Fattened Aleph, a reboot of the Borges story “The Aleph” that added new material, more than doubling its word count), has now been charged with “intellectual property fraud” and could do up to six years for his literary prank.
A collection of essays by Chloe Caldwell, I’ll Tell You in Person, due out next year, will be one of the first books published by Coffee House Press in their new partnership with the delectable Emily Books—it may be time to revisit Caldwell’s g-chat conversation with Emily Gould about the importance for women writers of “being a fan of yourself.” And if you succeed in that, Caldwell also teaches a memoir class in New York you can take.
Margaret Atwood will be publishing a series of autobiographical cartoons in a Kickstarter-funded Canadian anthology called The Secret Loves of Geek Girls, which one hopes will be more or less exactly what it sounds like.