“Clearly, this is an issue worth revisiting,” says Geoff Dyer in an article about rereading, which also features short pieces by Hilary Mantel, Marina Warner, and others. Rereading seems to be on people’s minds these days. In the most recent issue of Bookforum, Eric Banks writes about Patricia Meyer Spacks’s On Rereading—and revisits some of his favorite books about horse-racing.
Three Cups of Tea author Greg Mortenson, who drew fire from Jon Krakauer last year, has agreed to pay 1 million for “misusing the charity he set up.” The Montana-based charity, which was supposed to promote education in Central Asia, was allegedly also used to promote and buy copies of Mortenson’s book.
Gunther Grass has now been barred from entering Israel due to his controversial poem in which he criticized Germany’s sale of nuclear arms to the country.
Allegations have surfaced that Amazon UK hasn’t paid taxes over the past three years—despite generating between “£7.6 billion and £10.3 billion” in profits over that period. The company based its refusal to pay taxes on two loopholes that it believed applied to it: Amazon UK claimed that it is not a retailer, and that, despite its name, it is not based in the UK.
Classicist and critic Daniel Mendelsohn and his father try—and fail—to retrace the voyage of Odysseus. “In the end, we never got to Ithaca—never followed ‘in the wake of Odysseus,’ as the brochure for the cruise had promised," he writes.
Underworld, The Boys of Summer, and The Southpaw top the New York Times’ shortlist of the best books to read to celebrate the beginning of the baseball season.
An amazing resource is now available via the Burroughs Archive: complete scans of Fuck You, A Magazine of the Arts 1961-1965, the raucous magazine put together by legendary Fug and poet Ed Sanders.
