Special Characters

October 1, 2021

With In Love, NBA/NBCC finalist Bloom (White Houses) takes us on a painful journey as her husband retires from his job, withdraws from life, and finally receives a diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer's; she recalls both the love they experienced and the love it took to stand by him as he ended his life on his own terms. In The Beauty of Dusk, New York Times columnist Bruni contemplates aging, illness, and the end of the road as he describes a rare stroke that deprived him of sight in his right eye, even as he learns that he could lose sight in his left eye as well. In Aurelia, Aur�lia, Lannan Literary Award-winning novelist Davis (The Silk Road) considers how living and imagining interact in a book grounded in the joys and troubles of her marriage and her husband's recent death. Raised in an ultra-orthodox Jewish household and married off at age 19 to a man she barely knew, Haart made a Brazen decision more than two decades later, surreptitiously earning enough money to break away, then entering the fashion world, and finally becoming CEO and co-owner of the modeling agency Elite World Group. Adding to all those paw-poundingly wonderful canine celebrations that keep coming our way, And a Dog Called Fig is Dublin IMPAC long-listed Canadian novelist Humphreys's paean to dogs as the ideal companion to the writing life. In The Tears of a Man Flow Inward, Burundi-born, U.S.-based Pushcart/Whiting honoree Irankunda recalls how his family and fellow villagers survived the 13-year civil war in his country--with the help, crucially, of his kind and brave mother, a Mushingantahe, or chosen village leader--and how the war destroyed Burundi's culture and traditions. As private investigator Krouse explains in Tell Me Everything, she accepted a case of alleged sexual assault at a party for college football players and recruits despite reservations owing to her own experiences with sexual violence, then saw the case become a landmark civil rights case. In Red Paint, LaPointe, a Salish poet and nonfiction author from the Nooksack and Upper Skagit Indian tribes, explains how she has sought to reclaim a place in the world for herself and her people by blending her passion for the punk rock of the Pacific Northwest and her desire to honor spiritual traditions and particularly a namesake great-grandmother who fought to preserve the Lushootseed language. Undoubtedly, book critic Newton has Ancestor Trouble: a forebear accused of witchcraft in Puritan Massachusetts, a grandfather married 13 times, a father who praised slavery and obsessed over the purity of his bloodlines, and a frantic, cat-rescuing mother who performed exorcisms, all of which made her wonder how she would turn out. In How Do I Un-Remember This? comedian/screenwriter Pellegrino draws on his big-hit podcast Everything Iconic with Danny Pellegrino (over 13.5 million downloads in 2020) as he renegotiates 1990s pop culture and moments funny, embarrassing, or painful to limn growing up closeted in a conservative Ohio community. In Black Ops, Prado portrays a life that ranges from his family's fleeing the Cuban revolution when he was seven to his retirement from the CIA as the equivalent of a two-star general while also detailing the agency's involvement over the decades in numerous "shadow wars" (200,000-copy first printing). Segall came of age as a reporter just as tech entrepreneurs began to soar, and as she interviewed these Special Characters, she also rose to become an award-winning investigative reporter and (until 2019) CNN's senior tech correspondent (75,000-copy first printing).

November 22, 2021
Segall, a former CNN senior tech correspondent, reveals the ups and downs of her time interviewing tech giants, disrupters, and entrepreneurs in her plucky if faltering debut. From her first day as a news assistant at CNN in 2008 to her rapid rise as an on-air talent covering start-ups and tech, Segall describes how meeting the “scrappy, optimistic, out-of-the-box entrepreneurs” on her beat allowed her to gain a stronger understanding of herself and her ambitions to find “authenticity in a filtered world.” However, she attempts to position herself as an underdog, despite working for a media brand whose name opens doors for her: even with the “lowly status as a production assistant,” simply saying “Laurie from CNN” landed her an interview with Twitter cofounder Biz Stone. Segall admits that she struggled with vulnerability at the same time her career had her “asking people to open up, to reveal their hardest truths in an effort to regain their power.” But what she claims to be her most significant battles—“my inability to fit in... celebrating the strength of others instead of myself”—hold little weight when she fails to dig deeper beyond stories of spilled coffee and embarrassing text conversations. Unfortunately, this hero’s journey lacks a payoff. Agent: Becky Sweren, Aevitas Creative Management.

January 1, 2022
How an ambitious young journalist came of age in the tech sector and made her mark at CNN. In the economic dark days of 2009, then-23-year-old Segall wrote her first story for CNN.com, "about how a small business was trying to make do in the global recession by opening up a topless coffee shop in Maine." Elsewhere in the recession, she asserts, "a new creative energy" was emerging, represented by a group of brainy misfits who developed products that remain household names--Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Uber, Tinder--as well as some that fizzled and were forgotten. Collaborating with a few women colleagues who became close friends, Segall plotted, networked, and scrapped her way from transcribing tapes and typing chyrons to telling the story of tech on-screen. In 2010, she took vacation days and paid her own way to SXSW, where she pretended to be a producer and interviewed the whiz kids. Seven years later, she was there to premiere her own series, Mostly Human. As the kooky fun of the early days gave way to bots, hacking, fake news, and revenge porn, the author uncovered the Boston Marathon bomber's deleted Instagram account, documented the fallout of the Ashley Madison leak, and landed the first interview with Mark Zuckerberg after the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Segall ran into many obstacles--mainly her own persistent impostor syndrome and entrenched sexism at CNN--but whenever she faced rejection, she and her friends dropped everything and blasted Janis Joplin's "Another Piece of My Heart." A few downsides: The prose is only serviceable, some points are belabored, and romantic relationships seem to take as long to die on the page as they did in real life (a fight over who gets to keep Alexa is about as juicy as it gets). Inspiring on the personal level while somewhat chilling on the societal one.

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