On September 8, the Proof series will be complete.
After 25 years as an author and journalist, I'll have published 3 books on Trump—2,400 pages, with 12,000 major-media citations—in the second half of his first term. I hope you'll help me spread the word. amazon.com/dp/1250272998?…
After 25 years as an author and journalist, I'll have published 3 books on Trump—2,400 pages, with 12,000 major-media citations—in the second half of his first term. I hope you'll help me spread the word. amazon.com/dp/1250272998?…
The first book in the series, Proof of Collusion, was published days after the 2018 mid-terms—six months before the Mueller Report. It was a New York Times, USA Today, Amazon, Apple Books, Audible, Alibris, and iTunes bestseller. A link to buy it is below. amazon.com/Proof-Collusio…
The second book, Proof of Conspiracy, came in 2019. It was a NYT, WSJ, USA Today, Publishers Weekly, Amazon, Apple Books, Audible, Barnes & Noble, Alibris, and iTunes bestseller, and was named a Top 100 Political History Book of All Time by Book Authority. amazon.com/Proof-Conspira…
As many of you know, the series has been very well-received by readers. And not one fact in any book has been contested, maybe because—across the 3 books—I've worked with a team of 12 professional fact-checkers to make sure everything's right. Media has largely ignored the books.
I wrote these books using "curatorial journalism"—also called "metajournalism." It's why nearly every sentence has an endnote and the books read as both epic and report-like. The books demonstrate that in the digital age, the writing of a political history can begin in real time.
Readers of the books have noted that curatorial journalism—while using only existing major-media investigative reports, and relying in no part whatsoever on theorizing—has the effect of (though it may seem paradoxical) putting a book months or even years ahead of "breaking news."
It is, of course, a sort of conceptual illusion. It's not that the books predict the future—they're simply revealing that we know infinitely more in the *present* than we realize. Our only disadvantage is that we don't network and curate news sources. Metajournalism fixes that.
I don't believe media will soon change its view on what political nonfiction is in the digital age. The prevailing view is that only "nonfiction novels"—books with characters and scenes and manufactured or poorly "reconstructed" dialogue—can sell. I aim to prove that wrong also.
Because I edit the Best American Experimental Writing series, I know that innovation in writing is always met with hostility at first—always. So the Proof series was written for (a) future historians, and, far more importantly, (b) current readers. That's been my focus all along.
Though I've written/edited 18 books, and been all over media—see bio at link—with this series, for the reasons stated, I've come directly to readers to help spread the word. That's why I ask you to retweet the first tweet in this thread, if you're willing. sethabramson.net/bio
