WTF Amazon?!

Google Maps now allows users to take 3D photo tours of more than 15,000 popular sites around the world. Here’s Yosemite’s Half Dome, and here’s Trevi Fountain.

“I’ve learned that people—writers and non-writers alike—don’t like that word. Failure….  I take a bizarre pleasure, now, in using that word. Maybe because during my decade as a failed writer, the one thing that took the edge off was wallowing in that failure—carefully, in a proscribed fashion, like having a drink when you’re still hungover.” Stephanie Feldman writes for Vol. 1 Brooklyn about being a literary failure, about the two books she wrote and never published, and about the one she finally did. Pair with the stories of these 5 writers and their failed “novels in drawers.”

Cormac McCarthy is inspired by scientists, but did you know the author inspires drone doom bands?

American readers can now get their hands on the latest from Martin Amis, Lionel Asbo: State of England. Also out this week: The Devil in Silver by Victor LaValle, Paul Auster’s memoir Winter Journal, Dan Fesperman’s spy novel The Double Game, and a pair of debuts, Hanna Pylväinen’s We Sinners and Amanda Coplin’s The Orchardist.