The finalists for this year’s Lambda Literary Awards were announced yesterday. Nominees include Kristen Arnett’s Mostly Dead Things, Bryan Washington’s Lot, and We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan. The winners will be announced at a ceremony in June.
ProPublica reporter and New York Times Magazine staff writer Pamela Colloff has sold a book to Random House. A Deal With the Devil will tell the story of “America’s most prolific jailhouse informant, Paul Skalnik, the people he damaged on a decades-long crime spree, and the people and institutions that enabled him.”
Glenn Greenwald is working on a new book. You Can’t Silence This will be based on Greenwald’s reporting on corruption in the Brazilian government and details the attempts to silence him through criminal charges. The book will be published by Metropolitan in 2021.
Five authors take Literary Hub’s questionnaire. Jessi Jezewska Stevens says her new book The Exhibition of Persephone Q was inspired by “the Met, the controlled rage of ‘domestic’ fiction, and a select set of literary ranters in translation.” New Waves author Kevin Nguyen says that if he weren’t a writer and if his “eyes were better,” he would have liked to be a fighter pilot.
Publishers Weekly talks to bookstore owners in New York to see how they are being affected by the COVID-19 state of emergency. Some shops are reporting “some of the strongest sales since Christmas.” Greenlight Bookstore co-owner Rebecca Fitting said that sales are currently about the same as this time last year. “I figure if our customers are going to hole up inside due to this virus scare, books are going to be on their shopping list, so maybe we’re more inured than some,” she said.