Bookselling
Former Kramerbooks & Afterwords employees Scott Abel and Jake Cumsky-Whitlock will open a new bookstore in Washington D.C. “soon.” Solid State Books will be located in the Apollo building on H St. NE, which has a new Whole Foods as well, and according to the website, will “operate as a full-service general interest bookstore with a deep and diverse selection of fiction and non-fiction titles curated to appeal to neighborhood residents of all ages as well as to the many visitors from other parts of DC, Virginia, Maryland, and beyond.” Abel was general manager at Karmerbooks for a decade and Cumsky-Whitlock was head buyer.
The pair got a bank loan for about half of the $600,000 in funding, the Washington Post says, and raised the rest from community loans that will be paid back over the next six years.
Legal
Former chief of Counterintelligence Operations at the Department of Defense Mark Fallon has enlisted the ACLU and Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute to help liberate his manuscript from government review, including a letter to Congress earlier this week. Fallon submitted Unjustifiable Means: The Inside Story of How the CIA, Pentagon, and US Government Conspired to Torture for review at the beginning of the year, expected Defense to review it within 6 weeks. Chief of the Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review Darrell Walker tells Reuters the problem is that 10 different agencies need to review the manuscript, and two are not finished year. “We are definitely not trying to keep him from publishing,” Walker says. “We are trying to push it out.” The ACLU’s letter says that the government hasn’t told Fallon “the list of all other agencies reviewing the book, or even the number of agencies reviewing.”
Fallon calls the book “an inside view of the fight to try to stop torture,” and tells Reuters, “There was a tremendous opposition within the government itself believing these were war crimes, and I name names.” When sold in 2015, the book was first titled We Tortured Some Folks: Terrorizing the American Way. It’s still due from Regan Arts, which multiple agents report cancelled a number of pending titles, accompanied by significant staff reductions that were reported in part over the last year. (Fallon’s acquiring editor was Lucas Wittmann, among the editors who no longer work at Regan Arts.) Queries about the imprint’s future over the past few months have not been answered.
Author Laura Kipnis and HarperCollins filed an extensive motion to dismiss a Northwestern graduate student’s Jane Doe lawsuit over the book Unwanted Advances on July 21, covered in detail yesterday by Northwestern’s newspaper.
People
Former White House press secretary Sean Spicer has signed with attorneys Bob Barnett and Michael O’Connor at Williams & Connolly to negotiate TV deals, speaking appearances, and a potential book deal.