Topics discussed: last week’s column, next week’s column, the week after next week’s column, infinite recursiveness, Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman, Gawker, book reviews, embargoes, Marco Rubio, Donald Trump,… Read more »

Ken Kalfus, the author of, among other things, the funniest novel ever written about 9/11 and the best short story ever written about an IMF official, recently published a piece… Read more »

Josephine Livingstone had a hit piece on Gawker yesterday titled “Ban Men From Literary Readings.” She argues that a “Q&A session after a reading isn’t a contest,” and that comments… Read more »

Amazon mistreats its employees. It may not mistreat them worse than some employers. It may not mistreat all of them. Some of the mistreatment might be laid at the feet… Read more »

James Franco has been trying for some time now to convince everyone that he’s a novelist of deep and meaningful works. Now in a new interview with Shelf Awareness, he’s… Read more »

The New York Daily News has reported that retail chain Urban Outfitters has made the decision not to stock a new title, The Book of Jezebel. This wouldn’t normally make news,… Read more »

The unspeakable glamour of the writer’s life: Gawker reports on a new low in writers’ wages, stumbled upon in this Craigslist ad. The as-yet untraced company in Portland, Oregon, is searching… Read more »

“I sometimes wonder if Adam Gopnik was put on this earth to annoy,” James Walcott once wrote in the New Republic. “If so, mission accomplished.” Renata Adler, no friend of Walcott’s,… Read more »

An interesting side note to the ongoing controversy over Mike Daisey’s monologue about Apple, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs”: In what Jack Shafer calls a fresh “fabulist… 1 / Read more »

What frequently used metaphors make you shudder, dear readers? As George Orwell writes in his oft-quoted essay, “Politics and the English Language”: “The sole aim of a metaphor is to… Read more »