N. Korea can’t get enough literary ‘Fire and Fury’
Michael Wolff ’s book about President Trump’s White House has made its way to one of the most isolated corners of the planet: Kim Jong Un’s North Korea, where state media praised it Thursday for foretelling “Trump’s political demise.”
The book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, has received mixed reviews: Some critics and readers call it an unputdownable exposé of a juvenile and dysfunctional administration, and others say it amounts to little more than unsubstantiated gossip.
North Korea’s Rodong Sinmun newspaper said in a commentary that robust sales for the book reflected “rapidly surging anti-Trump sentiments in the international community.”
The paper said the “anti-Trump book is sweeping all over the world, so Trump is being massively humiliated worldwide,” and “voices calling for the impeachment of Trump are on the rise not only in the United States but also abroad.”
Since the book was published about a week ago, it “has triggered a debate on whether Trump is qualified to be presi- dent, even in Western Europe,” the newspaper said.
Fire and Fury, which takes its title from Trump’s threat to unleash “fire and fury” after North Korea’s missile and nuclear tests, sold 29,000 copies its first weekend after being published Friday. Digital sales topped 250,000, and audio sales exceeded 100,000, according to John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan, the parent company of the book’s publisher, Henry Holt.
The publisher increased an initial announced printing of 150,000 to more than 1 million, according to the Associated Press.