By Edgar Allan Poe.
TECH: Did This Man Just Kill Print?
Books have been very good to Jeff Bezos. When he sought to make his mark in the nascent days of the Web, he chose to open an online store for books, a decision that led to billionaire status for him, dotcom glory for his company and countless hours wasted by authors checking their Amazon sales ratings. But as much as Bezos loves books professionally and personally — he’s a big reader, and his wife is a novelist — he also understands that the surge of technology will engulf all media. “Books are the last bastion of analog,” he says, in […]
WORTH REPEATING: It’s A Raymond Chandler Evening
“There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.” — Raymond Chandler, ‘The Red Wind’ * LA TIMES: Porno For Pyros NEW YORK TIMES: One Million Evacuated + Half Million Acres Burned=Heckuva A Job HUFFINGTON POST: In a June report, the GAO report […]
NAOMI WOLF: First They Came For The ‘Terrorists’…
In Boulder, two days ago, a rosy-cheeked thirtysomething mother of two small children, in soft yoga velours, started to tear up when she said to me: `I want to take action but I am so scared. I look at my kids and I am scared. How do you deal with fear? Is it safer for them if I act or stay quiet? I don’t want to get on a list.’ In D.C., before that, a beefy, handsome civil servant, a government department head — probably a Republican — confides in a lowered voice that he is scared to sign the […]
NEWS CLUES: It’s Like Adderall For Your Eyeballs
WATERGATE TAPE: Nixon Describes Fred Thompson As A Useful Idiot Fred Thompson has made much of his role 30 years ago as a young Senate lawyer helping to lead the investigation of the Watergate scandal and President Richard Nixon. But a much different, less valiant picture of Thompson emerges from listening to the White House audiotapes made at the time, as President Nixon plotted strategy with his aides in the Oval Office. Thompson’s job on the Watergate committee was to lead the Republican side of the investigation. As the investigation picked up speed, Nixon grew increasingly concerned about whether Thompson […]
AUTHOR, AUTHOR: The Bard Of Main Street USA
[illustration by ALEX FINE] Richard Russo, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls, spoke to PHAWKER about what spurs him to write about small-town life, class and it’s relation to geography in his new book, Bridge of Sighs, and his newest screenplays. He will be speaking at the Free Library tonight. PHAWKER: How has winning the Pulitzer changed how you live and write? RICHARD RUSSO: Well I got caller ID. [laughs] That’s one way it’s changed how we live. I think it changed my writing more; it was just such a wonderful thing to happen that I kind of […]
AUTHOR AUTHOR: John Leland Saw The Best Minds Of A Generation Destroyed By Madness, Starving Hysterical Naked, Dragging Themselves Through The Negro Streets At Dawn Looking For An Angry Fix, Angelheaded Hipsters Burning For The Ancient Heavenly Connection To The Starry Dynamo In The Machinery Of Night. Etc.
PHAWKER: You were, to my mind, the first white rock critic of stature to take rap music seriously. You had that column in Spin back in the mid-80s when Spin really mattered and you were always plumbing the depths of Stetsasonic and Biz Markie and shit. I remember Guccione writing in his Letter From The Editor “is Leland really serious with this rap thing?” What flipped your switch and caused you to sit up and pay attention? JOHN LELAND: I lived in an apartment on 99th Street [in New York] which was right by the handball court and where there’s […]
AUTHOR, AUTHOR: 13 Things You Are Not Supposed To Know About Daniel Handler, AKA Lemony Snicket
1. Mr. Handler is answering these questions while sipping his second Blanton’s in his posh room at the Four Seasons. 2. Mr. Handler plays accordion on the new Magnetic Fields album, Distortion, due out in January. He will be touring with the band on the West Coast. 3. Mr. Handler only bothered to learn to play the accordion so he could pick up chicks. “When I was coming up it was during that brief time in rock history when no keyboard whatsoever was cool, and that’s the only instrument I played. I really, really wanted to be in a band, […]
NEVER FORGET: The NAZIS Burned Books
Sponsored by the American Library Association, the American Booksellers Association, and a variety of other groups, Banned Books Week (Sept. 29-Oct. 6, 2007) celebrates the first amendment right to free speech, which includes the right to read and write books that are considered unorthodox or controversial. A banned book is one that has actually been removed from a library or school system, a “challenged” book is the attempt to ban such material. THE 10 MOST CHALLENGED BOOKS OF 2006 And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell Gossip Girls (Series) by Cecily Von Ziegesar Alice (Series) by […]
EARLY WORD: Sangria And Santa Sangre At Molly’s
Molly’s Bookstore will host a film screening of Jodorowsky‘s classic Santa Sangre on Friday, September 14 to dedicate our new mosaic facade by Isaiah Zagar. Doors open at 7PM and the screening starts at 8PM. Admission is free. Donations and book purchases are encouraged. Join us for free sangria, refreshments and surprise special guest performances before and after the film. Molly’s Bookstore is a general interest new and used bookstore. It is located at 1010 S. 9th Street, in the heart of The Italian Market.
MUST HEAR RADIO: It Can’t Happen Here?
FRESH AIR As head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, Jack Goldsmith led the team of lawyers that advises the presidency on the limits of executive power. During his tenure, he battled the Bush White House on the now-infamous “torture memos,” as well as on issues of surveillance and the detention and trial of suspected terrorists. Goldsmith resigned his post after nine months. He’s speaking publicly for the first time about why he resigned in a new memoir, The Terror Presidency — which also recounts what he witnessed in Attorney General John Ashcroft’s hospital room, when Alberto Gonzales and […]
AUTHOR, AUTHOR: Rick Moody Q&A
BY MAVIS LINNEMANN BOOK CRITIC Rick Moody tackles the hallucinatory pathologies of American paranoia in Right Livelihoods, a collection of three thematically-connected novellas. Each story centers on a paranoid protagonist who serves as unreliable narrator and as a result, the reader spends an awful lot of time wondering just what the hell is going on — which only adds to the ultra-vivid realism and disconcerting familiarity of it all. Add to the mix varying degrees of alcoholism and a drug that helps you recover memories, thwarted obsession and intra -office subterfuge, and a bomb that flattens Manhattan from The Hudson […]
TEXAS OBSERVER: O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Chasing Assassins Bobby Kennedy died believing his brother’s killers had not been found by Matthew Stevenson/THE TEXAS OBSERVER Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years By David Talbot Simon & Schuster 478 pages, $28 When President John F. Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas in November 1963, his younger brother Robert, then the U.S. attorney general, was having lunch at his home in northern Virginia. As recounted in Brothers, David Talbot’s stirring and troubling history of Bobby’s descent into the underworlds of conspiracy, word of the shooting reached him when J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, telephoned. In […]
