From Trump to #MeToo, publishing made the headlines

By Hillel Italie

AP National Writer

NEW YORK

The publishing world made headlines in 2018, and not always by design. A wave of best-sellers offered damaging accounts of Donald Trump’s White House, a million-selling memoir by Michelle Obama had readers longing for the previous administration and a political thriller by former President Bill Clinton had some taking a closer look at a White House scandal from the 1990s. Meanwhile, some of the country’s top writers were called out for sexual harassment and a Dystopian novel written in the 1980s seemed ever more timely.

Here are some highlights:

FIRE AND FURY

It quickly had the country talking and Trump threatening to sue. Michael Wolff’s tale of backbiting and chaos in the Trump administration wasn’t so much a revelation, as a confirmation of what millions had suspected. Reporters questioned some of his facts but the book had at least one real consequence: Former senior adviser Steve Bannon, who didn’t deny speaking with the author and criticizing both the president and Donald Trump Jr., was forced out as executive chairman of the far-right Breitbart News. His old boss called him “Sloppy Steve.”

#METOO

It began in January with a comments thread on the website of School Library Journal: Stories of widespread harassment by some prominent writers for children and young adults, with the alleged harassers first unnamed, then named. Within weeks “Maze Runner” author James Dashner had been dropped by his publisher and “13 Reasons Why” novelist Jay Asher by his agent. Sherman Alexie, whom the American Library Association had just awarded a Carnegie Medal for his memoir “You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me,” declined the prize.

PASSAGES

Within eight days last spring, two of the country’s most celebrated writers died, Tom Wolfe and Philip Roth. But 2018 also was a year for welcoming new voices. Tara Westover’s “Educated,” a memoir about growing up in an isolated Mormon home, was a best-seller admired by everyone from book critics to former President Barack Obama. Tommy Orange’s novel “There There” was widely acclaimed and the rare work of literary fiction over the past year to succeed commercially.

THE PRESIDENT IS MISSING

The million-selling collaboration between Clinton and James Patterson was the novel of the summer, and launched a very different conversation from what the authors had intended. The book also included a chapter about a president facing impeachment – an experience Clinton is uniquely qualified to draw upon.

FEAR

Bob Woodward, a brand name for inside White House politics, seemed to withdraw during the Obama years. But Trump is a singular muse for political writers and with “Fear: Inside the Trump White House,” Woodward was fully back in the present.

BECOMING

The initial headlines were about Trump, whom Michelle Obama vowed she would never forgive for promoting the “birther” lie that her husband was born in Kenya. But Obama’s book quickly became among the best-selling political memoirs ever.

MARGARET ATWOOD

The Canadian author didn’t need to publish any new fiction to make news in 2018. “The Handmaid’s Tale,” released more than 30 years ago and dramatized in an acclaimed Hulu series, continued to rank with George Orwell’s “1984” as a defining dystopian text for the current time. Questions from readers about the imagined country of Gilead were so persistent that Atwood finally changed her mind about writing a sequel and announced that “The Testaments” would come out in 2019.

A HIGHER LOYALTY

In a spirit of anger, admiration and curiosity, readers wanted to know why James Comey re-opened the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails less than two weeks before Election Day and what he and Trump had said to each other before Trump fired him in May 2017, just four months into his administration.