At Page Turner, Richard Brody wonders why Norman Mailer never wrote “the book that he was born to write—the bildungsroman of a Maileresque boy in Brooklyn in the nineteen-thirties.”
Early reviews are in for Morrissey’s long-awaited autobiography, and they’re all over the map. The Telegraph delivers a rave, praising the book’s “beautifully measured prose style” (and calling it “certainly the best written musical autobiography since Bob Dylan’s Chronicles”), while The Guardian is less convinced. “For its first 150 pages, Autobiography comes close to being a triumph,“ writes John Harris, “but after pages and pages of moaning, it all starts to pall…. Moreover, a pattern is set: any calamity or mishap is always someone else’s fault.”
We’d be curious to hear what the outspoken Oasis frontman Noel Gallagher thinks of Morrissey’s book. In an interview with GQ, he shares his thoughts about books, saying that he’s not fond of “the Rubik’s Cube of shit [book] titles” out there nowadays, the insufferable intellectual pretensions of anybody who reads, or attending book signings. The Nobel Prize Foundation is running out of money: According to Bloomberg, the organization “is now considering charitable donations after previous strategies failed to bring in enough money.”
Courtesy of Business Insider, here’s a nifty infographic of the most famous books set in every state. There’s a real range: New York gets The Great Gatsby, New Jersey gets Junot Diaz’s Drown, and South Dakota gets Tom Brokaw’s A Long Way From Home.Authors of self-published erotica are striking back at efforts by Amazon and other e-book retailers that want to remove content that deals with rape, incest, and child pornography. On Wednesday, a petition appeared on Change.Org protesting the move. “There is a LARGE amount of people who read this genre as a way to escape their reality,” wrote a poster called “Mlstress Renne.” “We are all consenting adults, you need to own a credit card to be able to purchase said books, so why all of a sudden start ‘cracking down’ on controlling such. Why is okay to sell ‘adult products’ on said websites but not FICTIONAL reads. What happened to freedom of speech?!”