Footnotes, July 2020: Book links from around the web

At The Reading List, we’re trainspotters when it comes to interesting book links, and here are a number that caught our eye.

RIP Elsa Joubert and George Hallett. South Africa is much the poorer without you.
You no longer have to guess about how much authors get paid – or how large the discrepancies are between, say, first-time white male authors and their black women counterparts. Just head over to #publishingpaidme and see for yourself.
Speaking of ‘writing while black’, you do not want to miss this piece by Kiese Laymon on that very subject.
The Trump books are coming. There’s Washington Post reporter Mary Jordan’s, which broke the story about how Melania re-negotiated her pre-nup with the president by refusing to live with him in the White House until she got what she wanted. (Respect…?) Meanwhile, John Bolton’s little number, The Room Where it Happened, only went and sold 780,000 copies in its first week in the US. Blimey. Those are the kind of numbers to turn a president’s head. And the book by Trump’s only niece, Mary Trump Ph.D, seems set to be OK’d for release soon, after a battle in the courts. Apparently she’s out for blood.
There’s also a plague happening. It’s not the first time. Take a look at this piece in the TLS on ancient plagues for context and Renaissance-era depictions of what went down. As in: “the bowels dissipate in a flow, a fire that begins in the innermost depths burns up into wounds in the throat, the intestines are shaken with continuous vomiting, the eyes are set on fire” and so forth. Fun!
Actually, we can’t keep our eyes off America. Here’s a cheering piece on indigenous American fascism. Things are going well over there.
Let’s end on an uplifting note. Have you watched this? It’s called The Great Realisation – a poem by spoken word artist Tomos Roberts. He uploaded it on 29 April and it’s since racked up 6 million views on YouTube alone – and 60 million overall, or so they say – which is rather a lot for a poem. Now The Great Realisation will be a book, thanks to a deal cut with Egmont/HarperCollins. He’s originally a Kiwi, so we’ll say – ‘Sweet as’!