Molly Jong-Fast—an editor at large at the Daily Beast and cohost of The New Abnormal podcast—has sold her book The Last Good Day to Simon & Schuster for a reported six figures. According to the publisher, the book examines how trends in the 1990s set the stage for the political clashes and inequality of the present, illustrates “how technological innovation outpaced our ability to regulate it,” and “how government policies fanned the flames of war and cultural division no one could yet fathom.”
Jhumpa Lahiri and Princeton classics professor Yelena Baraz are working on a new translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses for the Modern Library imprint. Penguin Random House calls it “a fresh, nuanced, and faithful rendering” of the Latin poem, adding that the translation illuminates “transformation, loss of agency, and reclamation of power in one of the most influential works of Western culture.”
Blakey Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth, which has been dropped by Norton, has a new publisher, the Associated Press reports. Skyhorse Publishing told the AP that its paperback edition of Philip Roth: The Biography will be available on June 15, and hopes to have the e-book and audio editions ready by Wednesday.
At 4Columns, Blair McClendon writes about Barry Jenkins’s television adaption of The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead’s speculative abolitionist fiction, which won the Pulitzer Prize. McClendon says he was at first worried that Jenkins’s talents would not translate to TV: “I feared that the grammar of television was so antithetical to what he excelled at that it would be his undoing. Instead, Jenkins has hopefully put to rest what it means to say that a show ‘looks like cinema.’”
On Wednesday at 3 PM EST, Tobi Haslett will moderate a discussion on “Riot Logistics,” featuring Joshua Clover, Charmaine Chu, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Shemon Salam.
Merve Emre will present a talk on “The Pernicious Fiction of the ‘Public Intellectual’” for the Bonn Lectures in the Public Humanities on July 15 via Zoom.