Round-Up: Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie, Cormac McCarthy, and Neil Gaiman

From Neil Gaiman’s new book to Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie’s short story about Melania Trump, here’s this week’s biggest literary news:

• This past week, author Cormac McCarthy was the victim of a Twitter hoax. Apparently pretending to be @AAKnopf (the Twitter account of publisher Alfred A. Knopf),  Twitter user @AKnopfNews, tweeted: “URGENT. Author Cormac McCarthy dies for [sic] stroke at 82.” Many fans took this tweet to be factual. At least one major news source, USA Today, retweeted the information. Later that day, the account revealed itself as a hoax. The Director of Publicity at Knopf, Paul Bogaards, confirmed that it was a hoax, and that acclaimed author McCarthy is still alive and well.
• W.W. Norton announced this past week that it will publish a new Neil Gaiman book. The book, currently titled Norse Mythology, will be released in February 2017 in hardcover as well as in e-book form. The book will be Gaiman’s re-telling of the classic Norse Myths that inspired him as a child. In describing the book, Gaiman commented: “I hope that I have retold stories that read like the real thing: sometimes profound, sometimes funny, sometimes heroic, sometimes dark, and always inevitable.”
• The New York Times Book Review asked acclaimed author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to write a short story about the current U.S. election. The piece was published this past week under the title “The Arrangements,” and follows a fictionalized version of Melania Trump. Melania Trump is the wife of 2016 Presidential Candidate Donald Trump.  A second work of election-related fiction will be published this fall by a different author.