U.S. forces stationed in a remote area of Afghanistan recently received about twenty copies of Bill O’Reilly’s book Pinheads and Patriots. Their orders upon receiving the tomes: Burn them.
O’Reilly Book Burn
Everything I Despise
Can you tell the difference between complaints by Jonathan Franzen and YouTube comments about the evils of saggy pants?
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Face/Off
If you (for some reason) want to know more about Vladimir Putin, you could do worse than reading Masha Gessen's biography. At The Rumpus, Kevin Thomas reviews the book in a novel medium: a cartoon. (You could also read our interview with Gessen.)
Light of Lepidoptery
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“Vista as vortex”
Mike McCormack delves into the view from his house in Galway.
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Free JSTOR Articles
JSTOR will be making 500,000 articles from over 200 journals freely available to the public. These will include items published before 1923 in the US, and published before 1870 abroad. Earlier this month, I rounded up a few pieces by people who think the entire database should be free.
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Writing is excessive drudgery.
Over on the Atlantic there's a compendium of cheeky marginalia Monks and their scribes have scribbled into gilded manuscripts, courtesey of Lapham's Quarterly.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Bender, Marias, Sayrafiezadeh
Out this week: The Color Master, a new short story collection by Aimee Bender; an English-language translation of The Infatuations by Javier Marias; and Brief Encounters with the Enemy, the new Saïd Sayrafiezadeh book that Scott Cheshire reviewed for us on Monday. Read more about these and other releases in our Great 2013 Second-Half Book Preview.