From Entertainment Weekly: Susan Orlean explains her drunken viral Twitter thread, candy-coated fennel seeds and the comfort of cats…  Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free!

Longtime New Yorker writer Susan Orlean has delighted readers with her articles and books, including the 2000 tome The Orchid Thief, which would inspire the Nicolas Cage-starring film Adaptation. But on Friday, Orlean caught our attention with a much shorter literary form, drunkenly updating the world on Twitter about an assortment of subjects ranging from her neighbors’ newborn colt to her cat to the pandemic to homemade yogurt.

Orlean kicked matters off with a sober tweet about her decision to pray for the cancer-stricken Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Four hours later, she tweeted one, revealing word — “Drunk” — and then explained that she had visited her neighbors to see their newborn colt and that “we had some wine.”

“Ok a newborn colt rocks it totally and he thought my hand was his mom,” Orlean wrote next. “It was not. He has tasted life’s infinite tragedy. As I mentioned Earlier I am inebriated.”

“You know I am currently trying to write a memoir and feel like a clown because WHO CARES ABOUR MY STUPID LIFE but maybe?” she wrote soon afterwards.

“Maybe I am drinking too much during THE F—ING PANDEMIC,” she wrote next.

And then: “I’m falling down drunk. First time in ages. Where is my kitty? He is my drunk comfort animal.”

And then: “I would like some candy.”

And then: “BTW where exactly Is my f—ing cat whe I need him (sic).”

After around two dozen tweets and self-replies, Orlean signed off with one final message: “Hahaha very funny whoever put the stool softener right next to the Tylenol.”

Orlean’s booze-fueled pronouncements received almost unanimously good reviews from Twitter-users who, like the writer, are presumably “SICK AND TIRED OF EVERYTHING” or possibly “going to check on our recycling bin because” or who want to exclaim “F— the recycling. Going to look for candy which I bet doesn’t exist. I. This house godd@@ Min it.”

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From CNN: Mary Trump‘s tell-all book had sold a staggering 950,000 copies by the end of its first day on sale, publisher Simon & Schuster said…  Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free!

Mary Trump‘s book, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” went on sale Tuesday and portrays President Trump in an unflattering light.

Just two weeks ago, Simon & Schuster celebrated the success of another Trump tell-all book, that one by former National Security Adviser John Bolton. The book, “The Room Where It Happened,” sold more than 780,000 copies in its first week of sales.

It is rare for books to sell hundreds of thousands of copies in a single week of sales — and most books will never sell that many.

“Too Much and Never Enough” will join other books about Trump that became sensational best-sellers.

“Fear” by legendary journalist Bob Woodward had sold 900,000 copies by the end of its first day of official sales. “A Higher Loyalty” by former FBI Director James Comey had sold 600,000 copies at the end of its first week on store shelves. And “Fire & Fury,” the hit book by Michael Wolff, sold more than 1.7 million copies by the time it had been out for a month.

The sales reflect a significant appetite for books that offer inside accounts of the Trump administration.

In some cases, Trump or his allies have sought to block unflattering books about him, which can backfire and provide an additional publicity boost to the books.

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From The Guardian: Someone has written a prequel to The Great Gatsby and it’s coming next year…  Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free!

Nick Carraway, last seen at the end of The Great Gatsby contemplating the futility of trying to move beyond our past, is set to reveal a little more of his own, with author Michael Farris Smith announcing his prequel to F Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel.

US copyright in The Great Gatsby, which is generally regarded as one of the best novels ever written, expires on 1 January 2021, meaning that the work enters the public domain and can be freely adapted for the first time. Farris Smith’s prequel, Nick, will be published four days later, on 5 January, in the US, by Little, Brown; and on 25 February in the UK by No Exit Press. The publishers say Nick Carraway will “step out of the shadows and into the spotlight”, with the story focusing on his life before his meeting with the enigmatic millionaire Jay Gatsby in Fitzgerald’s novel.

Its famously tragic ending leaves Nick considering how hard it is to move on from our histories, in Fitzgerald’s most famous line: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” More than 25m copies have been sold since it was published in 1925.

Farris Smith, the author of novels including Blackwood, The Fighter and Desperation Road, said he had always been drawn to Nick Carraway as a character.

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From NPR: Joanna Cole, whose Magic School Bus series made science both dazzling and goofily fun for generations of children, died on July 12 at age 75…. Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free!

Joanna Cole‘s death was announced by her publisher, Scholastic. The cause of death was not given.

She originally created The Magic School Bus in 1986 with illustrator Bruce Degen. The core idea of a sweet and nerdy crew of schoolchildren taking field trips into scientific concepts, bodily parts, into space and back to the age of dinosaurs — and always led by their teacher, the intrepid Ms. Frizzle — eventually spun out into dozens of tie-ins and more than 93 million copies in print, plus a beloved television show that aired for 18 years in more than 100 countries.

In the U.S., the original Magic School Bus TV series was broadcast by PBS for 18 years; in 2017, an updated version launched in 2017 on Netflix, with the first of four specials on the way in August. (Ms. Frizzle was a perfect role for a comedian: She was first voiced by Lily Tomlin, and then in the Netflix version by Kate McKinnon.)

The book series won many awards, including an NEA Foundation Award for Outstanding Service to Public Education.

Cole was born in Newark, N.J. in 1944. She said that her inspiration for Ms. Frizzle was her own fifth-grade teacher. Cole worked answering letters to the editor at Newsweek, as a school librarian and as a magazine and children’s book editor before become a full-time author herself. Her first title, published in 1971, was Cockroaches.

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From The Hollywood Reporter: Author Austin Channing Brown on lessons ‘I Am Still Here‘ memoir teaches amid current racial justice movement…  Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free!

Austin Channing Brown was fired from her job when she found the desire to write a book.

“I had a conversation with an editor at a publishing house and said, ‘I really want to write a book about navigating whiteness from a Black woman’s perspective that isn’t rooted in the ‘hood, it’s not sensational. I didn’t dodge a bullet. I didn’t suddenly meet white people. I’ve just been around white people my whole life and I want to write a book about that,'” Channing Brown tells The Hollywood Reporter.

The author now recalls how her editor essentially nixed the concept: “She said to me, ‘Austin, I understand, but because you’re not famous, no one will read it. No one will read that memoir.'”

That editor was later proved wrong as Channing Brown, who began her professional career working in the nonprofit sector, continued to write on her personal blog, and soon caught the attention of editors hoping to publish her work. At the time, poignant tales and perspectives from Black authors including Ta-Nehisi Coates and Roxane Gay were “hugely successful.”

“I think there was a new era of proving to the publishing world that people do want our stories. So I started working on my proposal all over again and, at that time, 10 publishing companies offered for the book,” Channing Brown recalls.

Channing Brown’s book, I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness (Convergent Books) would eventually be published in May 2018, but, to her surprise, two years later the book saw a whole new wave of success.

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From People.com: Mariah Carey has officially finished writing her memoir. The Meaning of Mariah Carey is now available for pre-order in anticipation of the Sept. 29 release date…  Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free!

Mariah Carey, 50, is adding author to the long list of feats she has achieved over her illustrious career, as she prepares to bring fans into her world through her written story, which is set to be released later this year in September.

Titled The Meaning of Mariah Carey, the pop crooner teamed up with writer Michaela Angela Davis to share her tale, described through a press release as, “an improbable and inspiring journey of survival and resilience as she struggles through complex issues of race, identity, class, childhood and family trauma during her meteoric rise to music superstardom.”

“By pulling back the curtain on perceptions often told through the filtered lens of media, Carey bravely and beautifully walks through her battles with gender and power dynamics, emotional abuse, public embarrassments, personal failures and phenomenal victories,” the release read. “In her own words and song lyrics, Carey reveals untold moments and intimate experiences along with anecdotes of sacred moments with iconic figures to craft an honest, unique and vivid portrait of her extraordinary life.”

On Wednesday, Carey announced that she had finished writing her memoir, sharing a photo to Instagram celebrating the completion of her upcoming book with a lengthy letter.

“It took me a lifetime to have the courage and clarity to write my memoir. I want to tell the story of the moments,” Carey began. “The ups and downs, the triumphs and traumas, the debacles and the dreams that contributed to the person I am today.”

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From Slate: Authors and illustrators reflect on what Arnold Lobel’s friendship-defining series means to them… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free!

“The very first thing is sad,” marvels Mac Barnett about the opening story in Frog and Toad Are Friends. Barnett, a prolific children’s book author whose work includes Sam and Dave Dig a Hole, is right about that. Though the book series by Arnold Lobel has filled young readers with a sense of warmth and closeness for five decades, Frog and Toad opens with disappointment and desperation. It is the first day of spring, and Frog is eager for a celebratory post-hibernation reunion. But Toad won’t get out of bed. He tells Frog to return in a month and hops back to sleep. Frog pleads, “But Toad, I will be lonely until then.” Instead of resigning himself to isolation, Frog sneaks back into Toad’s house, rips a handful of pages out of the calendar, wakes Toad back up, and tricks him into believing a month has passed. “Faced with the prospect of being alone for a month or committing an act of deception, he deceives his best friend,” Barnett explains. “And it’s a happy ending because they’re together. These amphibians, they act in complicated ways to each other, but the friendship is the only thing standing between them and despair.”

For the uninitiated, reading such deep psychodrama into a story about a couple of anthropomorphic polliwogs might seem a bit much. But anyone who’s spent time in the world Lobel built for these two critters knows that, if anything, it’s almost an understatement. Frog and Toad, like their forebears in The Wind in the Willows, may bumble about the forest in tweed sports coats, but the accumulated weight of the tales is unexpectedly moving. Though each short story begins with the premise of an adventure, the plot twist is that, invariably, nothing really happens. We don’t go far with Frog and Toad, yet in story after story, we do gain a crystalline sense of their relationship. Frog and Toad are friends, in every sustaining and stress-inducing sense of the word.

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