He might not be the writer we want, but is Tao Lin the writer the digital generation deserves?
The New Yorker‘s Book Bench flags the emergence of ‘hipster lit’ as a bookstore category, and wonders, rightly, where the women writers are.
Saul Bellow, Anthony Burgess, and Tobias Wolff all have first novels that are best forgotten, but among the three, Wolff has gotten closest to scrubbing his debut effort, Ugly Rumours, from publishing history, Elon Green writes at The Awl.
Britain’s House of Lords launches an inquiry into how the decline of newspapers will affect investigative journalism.
“The fact is that Borders has been facing headwinds for for quite some time, including a rapidly changing book industry, the eReaders revolution, and a turbulent economy,” company officials write in their sign-off email. “We put up a great fight, but regrettably, in the end, we weren’t able to overcome these external forces.”
At the London Review of Books, Alan Bennett waxes poetic about libraries.
Rolling blackouts, packed hospitals, and oven-like temperatures: Malcolm Gladwell considers the 1995 Chicago heat wave, and its political consequences.
The Telegraph excerpts part of Julian Barnes’ new novel, The Sense of an Ending.
Iran’s 72-year-old Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, lashed out against “harmful books” on Wednesday (i.e., ones that challenge his political authority) comparing them to “poisonous” drugs.