Oh, Boomer. If ever there was a Boomer it was you. Such. A. Boomer.

This August, as we prepare to unleash a truly remarkable fall catalog, MobyLives will be taking a bit of a breather. We’ll still post the occasional news item or feature, but for most of this month we’ll be posting a roundup like this every morning. We will, of course, remain active on Twitter and Facebook. We hope you have a great August, and that you’ll keep checking in with us!

• Our favorite culture minister, Aurélie Filippetti, is back! And she’s not happy about the way Amazon is treating Hachette. She described the dispute as “a new revelation of Amazon’s… anti-competitive practices. It is abuse of dominance and an unacceptable attack on access to books. (The group) is attacking literary and editorial diversity.” (The Bookseller)
• Appearing on BBC2‘s Newsnight, author Lee Child had some harsh words for Amazon. “Amazon is fantastically ambitious, they want to change the world and dominate and the Kindle simply hasn’t. It hasn’t worked as well as Amazon wanted it to work. It’s settled into a good, solid niche, which is fine from a business point of view, but not for Amazon. Amazon wants to take over the world.” Child also says that  if Amazon hired Scarlett Johanson to whisper stories into his readers ears, he’d be cool with that. (YouTube)
• Speaking of Child, you really don’t want to piss him off. Child’s at war with the commenters on the rabidly pro-Amazon Passive Voice blog. (The Passive Voice)
• Some people have figured out how George R.R. Martin‘s A Song of Ice and Fire ends! How does it end? Who knows! But some people have figured it out. Only George R.R. Martin knows who those people are, though. My theory? Jon Snow is his own father. (The Guardian)
• The New Yorker Festival is soon and Marc Philippe Eskenazi wrote a song about it. Is it twee? Sure it is. Does that matter. Yeah, sorta. But books are great, so whatever. (The New Yorker)
• Idlewild Books, a New York City-based indie that specializes in travel books and international literature, is doing great. (Shelf Awareness)
• We talked to Sheila Heti about our popular Twitter feed. (The Believer)

Today’s passage from Moby-Dick: 

Oh, grassy glades! oh, ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul; in ye, — though long parched by the dead drought of the earthy life, — in ye, men yet may roll, like young horses in new morning clover; and for some few fleeting moments, feel the cool dew of the life immortal on them. Would to God these blessed calms would last. But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm. There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause: — through infancy’s unconscious spell, boyhood’s thoughtless faith, adolescence’ doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally. Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.

Today’s song: “Ocean Death” by Baths