Kari Sutherland has joined Bradford Literary Agency as an agent. Previously she was an editor at Harper Children’s.
Bestselling Australian children’s book author Mem Fox, 70, is giving a face to the excesses of border control under the Trump administration. Now back in Australia, Fox told the media that she was detained and interrogated for two hours at Los Angeles Airport in early February, while traveling to a literary conference in Milwaukee, accused of having the wrong visa. (US officials were in error; Fox has visited the US more than 100 times in the past without incident.) She told Australia’s The Advertiser, “The way I was treated would have made any decent American shocked to the core, because that’s not America as a whole, it really isn’t. It’s just that people have been given permission to let rip in a fashion that is alarming.” She noted, “I am old and white, innocent and educated, and I speak English fluently. Imagine what happened to the others in the room, including an old Iranian woman in her 80s, in a wheelchair.”
She told ABC in Australia, “I have never in my life been spoken to with such insolence, treated with such disdain, with so many insults and with so much gratuitous impoliteness.” Fox added, “The entire interview took place with me standing, with my back to a room full of people in total public hearing and view — it was disgraceful. I felt like I had been physically assaulted which is why, when I got to my hotel room, I completely collapsed and sobbed like a baby.” Fox will likely never visit the US again after feeling like “a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay.”
Picks
Target announced their book club selections for March, April, and May all at once The Atomic Weight of Love by Elizabeth Church is the March pick; The Girls In The Garden by Lisa Jewell is the choice for April; and The One Memory of Flora Banks by Emily Barr is the May selection.
In addition, the March Pennie’s Pick at Costco is A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman.
In his closely-watched annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, Warren Buffett offered a book endorsement: “The best book I read last year was Shoe Dog, by Nike’s Phil Knight. Phil is a very wise, intelligent and competitive fellow who is also a gifted storyteller.”
Promoted
Audible introduced their Audible Voices ad campaign during the Oscar Awards telecast, showing two spots from a series of twelve featuring celebrity readers speaking powerful and timely words from well-known books (in this case quotes from Les Miserables and 1984).