Henry James, Raymond Chandler, Thomas Pynchon, J. K. Rowling, Franz Kafka: As a new anthology shows, no writer is too sacred for parody. Eric Ormsby considers highlights in the history of literary ridicule.
If you're looking for an exra-bleak holiday-weekend book, try Simenon's spiky psychological thriller Red Lights (1955), which opens on the Friday evening before Labor Day, as New Yorker Steve Hogan leaves his Madison Avenue office to meet his wife. They are about to drive to Maine, but first, Steve needs a drink. Once they're on the road, he pulls over at a bar, where he loses his wife (literally), meets an ex-con, and slips into his own personal hurricane. Need we mention that Steve's Saturday morning—which finds him sleeping on a roadside—isn't pretty? Needless to say, we hope your travels go better than Steve's did.
Flavorwire lists the top-ten bookstores in the U.S.
"Some nine months on, I can report that the Man Booker has done me nothing but good," writes novelist Hilary Mantel, who is working on a sequel to Wolf Hall. Still, the prize hasn't gone to her head: "Even when you are taking your bow, lapping up applause, you do know this brute fact: that you are only as good as your next sentence. You might wake up tomorrow and not be able to do it."
The anonymous satirical force known on Twitter as Evil Wylie grants an interview to Independent Publisher.
