These are bleak times for authors. Most of us – by which I mean those not in the exalted realm inhabited by JK Rowling and Dan Brown – find it ever harder to persuade publishers to give us an advance that will cover a few months’ electricity bills, let alone a sum to keep us supplied with booze and bacon sandwiches for the next couple of years while we write our masterpiece. So we may be tempted to rejoice at the news that the High Court in London has awarded Sarah Thornton £65,000 in damages to compensate her for a

Rock ‘n’ roll books have their own special set of challenges, the most important being: try not to reduce the wily, ridiculous, vibrant music of rejects and losers into a dry, studied word paste. But on the other hand, don’t try to mimic its high-energy squall with language either. Best not to engage with the music on that level at all; instead, point the tape recorder or pen in the direction of its makers and artists (but not its drummers … just kidding!), and let them tell stories about “what it was like.”

Here it is already August and I have received only one postcard this summer. It was sent to me by a European friend who was traveling in Mongolia (as far as I could deduce from the postage stamp) and who simply sent me his greetings and signed his name. The picture in color on the other side was of a desert broken up by some parched hills without any hint of vegetation or sign of life, the name of the place in characters I could not read. Even receiving such an enigmatic card pleased me immensely. This piece of snail

In the fall of 1963, in Leningrad, in what was then the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the young poet Dmitry Bobyshev stole the young poet Joseph Brodsky’s girlfriend. This was not cool. Bobyshev and Brodsky were close friends. They often appeared, in alphabetical order, at public readings around Leningrad. Bobyshev was twenty-seven and recently separated from his wife; Brodsky was twenty-three and intermittently employed. Along with two other promising young poets, they’d been dubbed “the magical chorus” by their friend and mentor Anna Akhmatova, who believed that they represented a rejuvenation of the Russian poetic tradition after the years

Everyone knows you can’t judge a book by its cover, but what about judging one by its author photo? Surely something can be inferred from an author’s surly eyebrows, or his affected stare into sunset? I bring this up because the author photo for Nicholson Baker’s latest novel, House of Holes: A Book of Raunch, so perfectly captures the book’s warmly horny voice. Baker—chub-cheeked, twinkle-eyed, sporting a Floridian sun-hat and snow white Santa beard—calls up a gentler Hemingway, less Old Man and the Sea than Old Man and the Giant Bottle of Viagra. He looks like a randy but harmless

As brand-name gear, advertising, and competitive championships changed the look of surfing for the MTV generation in ways both brilliant and vulgar, it was a cruel (endless) summer for some. Sage surf photographer John Witzig spat, “This new generation has no experience of the laid-back hippy trip. Being cool is uncool.” (Was surfing ever uncool?) A new book by Witzig’s contemporary Jeff Divine, photo editor of the Surfer’s Journal, presents yet another point of view. A follow-up to 2006’s Surfing Photographs from the Seventies, Divine’s latest volume is from the 1980s and shot mostly on color-saturated Kodachrome 64 in Southern

In 2005, Binyavanga Wainaina published a piece in Granta mocking the West’s need for African literature to present a uniform, tribal, black, desolate, and desperate homeland called Africa. He strives in his memoir, One Day I Will Write About This Place, to present life as it is and was, not in any fixed notion of “Africa,” but in the places he lived and traveled through: Kenya, South Africa, Lagos, Uganda, the Sudan. He does not present one mythical continent, but rather a fractured, complex, and ever-shifting collection of experiences. Sentence to sentence he jams ideas together, mimicking the way Michael

By playing on an all-too-human temptation to displace our hopes and fears onto celebrities and scapegoats, Murdoch’s journalism accelerates self-fulfilling prophecies of civic decay in every body politic it touches.