This August, as we prepare to unleash a bunch of incredible books into the world, 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!

• “Amazon’s role in developing disturbing new workplace trends, especially for non-white-collar workers, should be of central concern for labor advocates.” (Jacobin)
• Ursula Le Guin sets aside the distractions to look for a different, perhaps submerged, tragedy involving Harper Lee: maybe what Go Set a Watchman really shows us is that To Kill A Mockingbird, despite all of its great success, could have been something more, could have been somehow truer to the moral ambiguity and bankruptcy of The White South. (Usula K. Le Guin)
• Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s moves up the publication of Michael D’Antonio‘s Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success, a biography of the presidential candidate and baseball cap wearer. The final chapter may or may not be in the form of a Mad Libs. (The LA Times)
• “Loving and lauding Mockingbird assuages our self-blame, and in doing so, absolves us of responsibility.” William Giraldi on Lee is also a must read. (The New Republic)
• Here, a thrilling and brilliantly written story of deception, mistaken identity, and subconscious gender-bias in publishing by Catherine Nichols, who is an outstanding writer. In many ways this is a contemporary, empirical, take on Virginia Woolf‘s imaginary sister of Shakespeare. (Jezebel)
• Brilliant agent Kate McKean wrote a thoughtful response: “Publishing is a business, not a meritocracy, so what we want to work doesn’t always work–for more reasons other than what happens between the screen and my brain on any given Saturday.”
• Nouvella must be stopped! Donate money to stop Nouvella! Novellas must not be considered literature! (Kickstarter)
• A pretty good, long form look at the financial fallout of “l’affaire Hebdo,” which does an excellent job looking at the internal politics of the magazine over the past decade. (Vanity Fair)
• From Publishing Perspectives, a guest piece by the lunatic entrepreneurial spirit behind one of Greece’s newest publishing ventures, on the motivations and barriers to starting a business in the midst of a meltdown.
• Russia is banning books about WWII written by two British historians, on the grounds that they “promote Nazi stereotypes.” (The Guardian)
• Is nothing sacred anymore? On September 1^st, some 6,500 new words—among them “lolz,” “shizzle,” and “blech”—will enter the Scrabble lexicon, much to the dismay of competitive players in North America: “The U.S isn’t the eight-hundred-pound gorilla on the Scrabble block that it was twenty years ago.” (The New Yorker)
• This Saturday, an industrious collective of about 50 writers will bang out a novel from scratch in just 75 minutes. Is this good news or bad news? (Flavorwire)

This month’s roundups are brought to you by Future Days: Krautrock and the Birth of a Revolutionary New Music. Each roundup will feature a short excerpt of the book, and a couple of songs from a Krautrock band. Today’s band is Kraan.

Today’s excerpt:

Considering that Krautrock is so shaped by the German experience, historical, cultural, geographical, it’s perhaps surprising that one of the countries to have been least impressed by the music is Germany itself. It became popular in both France and the UK, and later the USA, Japan and points beyond. Less so its country of origin. ‘A prophet is not without honour save in his own country,’ says Amon Düül 2’s John Weinzierl, and that has largely been the case with Krautrock.

Klaus Mueller summarised in a precise, numerical formula the overall response to the new seventies German music in its own time. It read as follows:

Ignorance: 90%

Laughter: 5% (some journalists)

Respect: 5% (some journalists)

It was like Krautrock never happened. As far back as 1980, I remember attending a house party held by my German exchange tutor. I got talking to a rather serious longhair friend of his, who was from Hamburg. Excitedly, I tried to engage him on the subject of Faust, who had originated in that city, and at whose name I expected him to swell with civic pride. He knew nothing about them, he said, loftily, almost boastfully. ‘I am only interested in the important groups,’ he told me, ‘like Rainbow.’

Robert Hampson of Loop recalls, ‘When we first went to Germany and I talked of the likes of Can to German journalists, they often had never heard of these bands. I was shocked. Considering that even Can had had a number-one single at one time with “Spoon”, most journalists only ever really knew of Kraftwerk, and even then, only the period from Autobahn onwards.’

Simple Minds’ Jim Kerr is equally flummoxed. ‘Germans don’t get it. I’ll discuss the German influences, Faust and so on, with them, and they don’t know what I’m talking about.’

Visiting Berlin, it is as if Krautrock’s bid to drive out Anglo-American rock as a predominant force never really made a dent. There are posters for upcoming gigs by Bon Jovi everywhere. The only umlaut in sight is that atop the name of Motörhead, also touring. Trips to two different restaurants afford a soundtrack that is a veritable elephants’ graveyard of pop songs long extinct in the UK – Alvin Stardust’s ‘My Coo-Ca-Choo’, Terry Jacks’s ‘Seasons in the Sun’, Nik Kershaw’s ‘Wouldn’t It Be Good’, Dire Straits’ ‘Sultans of Swing’.

None of this, however, is to suggest that Germans as a whole are too dumb to recognise their own cultural product. At a superficial level at least, there is an appeal in Krautrock of the Teutonic other, which, of course, means nothing to Germans themselves. Kraftwerk in particular fail to resonate the way they do overseas, in the Anglo-American market particularly. Partly this is because, not unreasonably, Germans have never considered there to be anything inherently amusing, or exotic, about being German. ‘No German identified with the concept projected by Kraftwerk,’ says Stefan Morawietz, who, it so happens, lives in Krefeld, birthplace of Ralf Hütter. ‘It was fulfilling all the clichés everyone had about Germany.’