Bookforum excerpts The Junket, Mike Albo's excellent Kindle Single about the travails of being a freelancer in New York: "If you haven’t been to Manhattan in the last ten years, you should know that it no longer trades in durable, fungible goods except for artisanal cheese and celebrity cupcakes. These days, the city is a marketplace of intangible ideas and the internet efforts that promulgate them. Now people make millions by crowd-sourcing, aggregating and hedging funds."
N+1 editor Chad Harbach’s novel The Art of Fielding is weeks away from hitting shelves, but it’s already been optioned for an HBO series.
In the September issue of Vanity Fair, Michael Lewis’ twenty-page assessment of Germany’s role in the European financial crisis (titled, naturally, “It’s the Economy, Dummkopf”) is not winning him friends among economists or policy wonks. At the New York Times Magazine blog The 6th Floor, journalist Stephan Seiler takes issue with the feature, and implies that one of the more bizarre proposed explanations for why Germany is willing to prop up Europe—the country’s fascination with excrement—might reveal more about Lewis than his subject.
BookLamp, the “Pandora for books,” is now live.
On the occasion of his new book, Beijing Welcomes You, author and Deadspin editor Tom Scocca chats with GQ about America’s flagging prosperity, the global ascent of China, and “farmers with artillery pieces who were trying to shoot rockets into the clouds to make it rain.”
With the excuse that part of Colson Whitehead’s forthcoming novel, Zone One, is now available to read online, readers are encouraged to revisit Whitehead’s earlier writing, and in particular, his excellent 2008 satirical essay on being a writer in Brooklyn.
Public schools in Virginia's Albemarle County have been forced to remove Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mystery “A Study in Scarlet” on the grounds that the book is disrespectful to Mormons. The offending passage: “(John Ferrier) had always determined, deep down in his resolute heart, that nothing would ever induce him to allow his daughter to wed a Mormon. Such marriage he regarded as no marriage at all, but as a shame and a disgrace.”
