paper trail

Aug 15, 2013 @ 3:44:00 pm

Boris Kachka talks to the Awl about the ouroboric (and very insidery) process of writing and selling a book about the publishing house Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Salman Rushdie argued that we currently live in an age of “offendedness”: “Classically, we have defined ourselves by the things we love. By the place which is our home, by our family, by our friends. But in this age we’re asked to define ourselves by hate. That what defines you is what pisses you off. And if nothing pisses you off, who are you?”

The New York Times profiles internet contrarian and Bookforum contributor Evgeny Morozov, who, after publishing several books and becoming a “public, public intellectual” by his mid-twenties, decided to go back to school to get a PhD in the history of science. To learn more about the follies of what Morozov calls technological solutionism, read his review of a recent book by San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom.

Bookforum editor Chris Lehmann argues that anybody hoping that Jeff Bezos’s recent purchase of the Washington Post might bode well for the paper’s now-defunct “Book World” section can stop holding their breath: “Consider the company’s rather abusive relationship with its signature product, the book. Bezos launched Amazon in 1995 because he was looking for something that could be quickly shipped via Internet orders and would not perish in transit. It is only because books come in reassuringly uniform rectangular shapes and sizes, in other words, that the Post is now in the possession of a book retailer, as opposed to a cheese kingpin or a baron of Frisbees.”

We’re not sure why Charmin decided to put a Kafka book in a toilet paper commercial featuring animated bears, but it certainly has led to a fun comments thread.

The Daily News has tracked down a pair of Eugene O’Neill’s undies. They’re shrink-wrapped and on sale at an antiquarian bookstore in Salisbury, Connecticut for $1,750.