Any time two writers like George Saunders and Ben Marcus get together for an interview, it’s worth a read. Here are a couple of Millions essays on Saunders and Marcus, respectively.
Go Forth and Delight
The Complete Spy Magazine, Now Online
Like a time machine to the first Bush Administration, the complete archives of the late, lamented, and hugely influential Spy Magazine are now apparently available through Google Books (via). We’d offer a few keywords to get you started, but the riches are too many. Okay, fine. You twisted our collective arm. Ivana Trump. Henry Kissinger. O.J. Celebrity Pro-Am Ironman Nightlife Decathalon. Go nuts.
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The Steve Jobs Memory
As a result of Wednesday night’s tragic news, the release date of Walter Isaacson‘s forthcoming Steve Jobs has been pushed forward to October 24th. It already holds the #1 spot on Amazon.
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Gold in the New Millennium
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned author Wells Tower tracks the Klondike’s modern gold rush in his typically comprehensive way.
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Ask Ayn (Rand)
“I took maybe ten more speed pills and sat in a stall and wrote a new chapter of Atlas Shrugged,” writes Ayn Rand (er, um, John Hodgman). “Perhaps twenty-five thousand words, all on toilet paper.”
Alice Walker on Screen
Still deciding what to do this Friday night? Watch PBS’s new documentary on Alice Walker, Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth, at 9 p.m. EST. At The Daily Beast, Agunda Okeyo discusses the history of the film’s production, which took six years. “Stories about women of color told by women of color are sidelined and neglected in favor of our stories being told by white women and men,” director Pratibha Parmar says.
Black Bodies Online
“I couldn’t help but feel that technology had circled back to some of its earliest purposes: broadcasting anti-black violence as widely as possible, as both entertainment and warning.” Our own Ismail Muhammad writes for Real Life about the tension between bearing witness and perpetuating paradigms of white supremacy while on the web. And if you haven’t yet read it, do spend some time with this review of Nate Marshall‘s Wild Hundreds, which provides some fortification.
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“This annoying world”
We’ve grappled before with the dark world of Kindle self-publishing. We even published a cautionary tale of trying to live off Kindle erotica. In The Guardian, a look at the worst book covers of the Kindlesphere, all of which appear on an excellent Tumblr.
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