BookLink, the first two book vending machines were opened this week in downtown Houston — one is located in One Allen Center next to Amille’s Coffee and the other is in the food court at The Shops at Houston Center.
Teamwork and speed. Courtesy Jonathan Blanc/The New York Public Library
Formerly the NYPD captain in charge of Brooklyn’s major crimes investigations, Magaddino glides around the machine, with one hand gesturing to its component parts and the other clutching a styrofoam cup of coffee. Wearing a checked suit, he gloats in consummate Brooklynese about the remarkable operation this beast enables. Sorting items that move every day from the tip of the Bronx to the lip of Staten Island, his team tallied nearly 7.5 million successful deliveries last year.
The National Book Foundation has announced the long list of 10 books for the 2018 National Book Award for fiction. Finalists will be revealed on Oct. 10.
Fiction
Jamel Brinkley, “A Lucky Man” (Graywolf Press)
Jennifer Clement, “Gun Love” (Hogarth)
Lauren Groff, “Florida” (Riverhead)
Daniel Gumbiner, “The Boatbuilder” (McSweeney’s)
Brandon Hobson, “Where the Dead Sit Talking” (Soho Press)
Tayari Jones, “An American Marriage” (Algonquin)
Rebecca Makkai, “The Great Believers” (Viking)
Sigrid Nunez, “The Friend” (Riverhead)
Tommy Orange, “There There” (Knopf)
Nafissa Thompson-Spires, “Heads of the Colored People” (Atria)
Winners will be announced Nov. 14 at a ceremony in New York City.
Non Fiction
Carol Anderson, “One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy” (Bloomsbury)
Colin G. Calloway, “The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation” (Oxford University Press)
Steve Coll, “Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan” (Penguin Press)
Marwan Hisham and Molly Crabapple, “Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War” (One World)
Victoria Johnson, “American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic” (Liveright)
David Quammen, “The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life” (Simon & Schuster)
Sarah Smarsh, “Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth” (Scribner)
Rebecca Solnit, “Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays)” (Haymarket)
Jeffrey C. Stewart, “The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke” (Oxford)
Adam Winkler, “We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights” (Liveright)
A community — comprised of proud readers, book stores, libraries, publishing houses, and more — has become an online safe haven for bibliophiles. The content has been considered beautiful and engaging, but the photos and captions work to inspire others to pick up a book in an increasingly digital era.
New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt has a Mueller-oriented project in the works. Schmidt has blown the lid off some of the most consequential stories about the Russia investigation, and he now has a deal with Random House—brokered by Gail Ross of the Ross Yoon Agency. James Stewart is writing a book about the relationship between the White House, the F.B.I. and the Justice Department. Stewart, whose longtime agent is Amanda Urban at I.C.M., is working with Ann Godoff at Penguin on the as-yet-untitled work, which he said is tentatively slated for a fall 2019 release. It appears that the big political books of the Trump era have been minting big bucks. Jeremy Peters’s Insurgency: The Inside Story of the Battle for the Soul of the Republican Party, sold at auction in the high six figures. Earlier this year, Michael Wolff saw nearly 2 million copies of Fire and Fury fly off shelves in a matter of three weeks.
El Escorial Library in Madrid
