paper trail

Apr 20, 2010 @ 6:00:00 am

This airborne toxic event is giving the London Book Fair the doldrums

The "Airborne Toxic Event" has finally come to pass, just in time for Delillo fans to joke about it at the sparsely attended London Book Fair.

Ask your barista for a triple grande Balzac: the author had a "horrible, rather brutal method" for overcoming writer's block—a coffee creation so sinister that he recommended it "only to men of excessive vigor" (it eventually killed him). Elsewhere in Lapham’s Quarterly, a visual guide to the stronger stuff writers imbibed. 

Cory Doctorow asks, "can you survive a benevolent dictatorship?" You'd think he was talking about politics; but, alas, it's just another iPad story. Following his recent blog post, "Why I won't buy an iPad (and think you shouldn't, either)," Doctorow warns netizens of the dangers of Apple's hardware lockdown.

If you've had you're fill of internet iPunditry, skip the online version of the New Yorker's plush iPad profile and read the print version (on newsstands now). Though the story is already cold—it is the new iPhone that's heating up the web just now—the piece deserves serious reading-lamp-and-ottoman-style attention. Then, wander back to the screen and surf over to the magazine's online book club, where at 3pm today David Vann will live-chat with readers about his buzz-worthy book Legend of a Suicide.