The Brennan Center for Justice, a public policy Institute at NYU Law School, has launched a site dedicated to, in its phrasing, "justice books and ideas." Susan Lehman, director of communications, said the goal of the site is to start an ongoing conversation about justice and literature. She added that the strong response to the site--she's been inundated with excerpt offers from publishers and ideas from writers--speaks, in part, to the fact that the coverage of books in the media has dwindled so drastically in the last few years.
The site went live earlier this week and includes book reviews, Q&A's and essays. The content on the site, called Just Books, cuts a wide swath and current stories include an excerpt from David Remnick's new book on Baracak Obama (The Bridge, published this month by Knopf) as well as a Q&A with lawyer-author Gretchen Rubin, whose The Happiness Project (Harper, 2009) is a current bestseller.
Although the site will naturally focus on nonfiction, there is room to cover fiction, too. To that end, next month Just Books is running an excerpt from Scott Turrow's forthcoming Innocent, a sequel to the author's bestselling legal thriller Presumed Innocent.
Lehman, who has a background in both book and magazine publishing--she previously worked at Penguin and was one of the founding member of Salon.com--is overseeing all the editorial on the site and can be reached at susan.lehman@brennancenter.org.
