Author: GR

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The Book You’re Reading Might Be Wrong

Book publishers don’t employ fact-checking teams, and they don’t require a full fact-check before publication. Instead, a book is usually reviewed only by editors and copy editors—people who shape the story’s structure, word choice, and grammar. An editor might catch something incorrect in the process, and a lawyer might examine some claims in the book to ensure that the publisher won’t be sued for defamation. But that’s it. University presses typically use a peer-review process that helps screen for any factual errors. But in publishing more broadly, no one checks every date, quote, or description. Read more

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‘A Man in Full’ Debuts on Netflix

When Atlanta real estate mogul Charlie Croker faces sudden bankruptcy, political and business interests collide as Charlie defends his empire from those attempting to capitalize on his fall from grace. From writer & creator David E. Kelley and directors Regina King and Thomas Schlamme, A Man in Full is based on the New York Times bestselling novel by the late Tom Wolfe. Stars Jeff Daniels, Lucy Liu, and Diane Lane. Watch trailer

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The Essential Joan Didion

Didion was not really out to inspire us. She was looking at us and telling us what she saw, including our compulsion to weave myths for survival. Her distinctive prose and sharp eye were always tuned to an outsider’s frequency, even when she was actually an insider (as with most of her writing on Hollywood). Her essays are almost reflexively skeptical; she wrote with authority borne not so much from experience as from a refusal to give in to dogma. Read more

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A Novelist Who Finds Inspiration in Germany’s Tortured History

She became a writer because her country vanished overnight. Jenny Erpenbeck, now 57, was 22 in 1989, when the Berlin Wall cracked by accident, then collapsed. She was having a “girls’ evening out,” she said, so she had no idea what had happened until the next morning. When a professor discussed it in class, she said, it became real to her.

The country she knew, the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, remains a crucial setting for most of her striking, precise fiction. Her work, which has grown in acuity and emotional power, combines the complications of German and Soviet history with the lives of her characters, including those of her own family members, whose experiences echo with the past like contrapuntal music.

Her latest novel to be translated into English, “Kairos,” has been a breakthrough. It is now on the shortlist for the International Booker Prize and considered a favorite to win the award late next month. Read more

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