Slouching Towards Summer

From Andy Warhol’s A to Vassilis Vassilikos’ Z (and now Tom McCarthy’s C), AbeBooks lists the shortest book titles.

For the Class of 2013, salsa has always outsold ketchup. For these and other wry conjectures, see the latest edition Beloit College’s annual “Mindset List.” (N.B.: For the class of 2013, “mindset” is not a clunky neologism.)

In the wake of the Sandusky scandal, the Penn State alumni mag Penn Stater couldn’t ignore the news. The dark, shattered cover is not what you typically see from booster-ish alumni magazines.

This week, New Directions offers up a collection that may offer some context to the Roberto Bolaño oeuvre. As the catalog copy suggests, “Between Parentheses collects most of the newspaper columns and articles Bolaño wrote during the last five years of his life, as well as the texts of some of his speeches and talks and a few scattered prologues.” Also out: Library of America does Kurt Vonnegut with Novels & Stories, 1963-1973; The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture, a political tome by playwright David Mamet; and Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman, the scientist and polymath who was recently profiled in the New Yorker.