Banned Books Week

"What would happen if Donald Rumsfeld, former defense secretary and architect of the war on terror, was abducted at night from his Maryland home, held without charges in his own prison system, denied a trial, and kept in a place where no one could find him, beyond the reach of the law?" That's the question behind Eric Martin and Stephen Elliott's new novel Donald, forthcoming from McSweeny's.

Yesterday we noted that The Pale King is now available for pre-order. It turns out another new David Foster Wallace book will be out before the long-awaited final novel hits shelves. In December, Columbia University Press will put out Wallace's undergrad thesis Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will. From the publisher description: "Long before he probed the workings of time, human choice, and human frailty in Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace wrote a brilliant philosophical critique of Richard Taylor's argument for fatalism. In 1962, Taylor used six commonly accepted presuppositions to imply that humans have no control over the future. Not only did Wallace take issue with Taylor's method, which, according to him, scrambled the relations of logic, language, and the physical world, but he also called out a semantic trick at the heart of Taylor's argument."

I did not know this existed: Trivial Pursuit Book Lover's Edition. I suspect that Millions readers would be quite skilled. Sample question: "What Hardy novel features a doomed title heroine who names her daughter Sorrow?" Bookslut took the game for a spin a few years back.

At Guardian, Lionel Shriver (America’s best writer?) shares her frustrations in publishing as a female novelist: “A female novelist would never enjoy a Franzen-scale frenzy of adulation in America...”