paper trail

Nov 30, 2012 @ 12:00:00 am

Andy Greenberg

New Yorkers: the first meeting of the Public TransLit Book Club will be held on Dec. 11 at the Lolita Bar on Broome Street. And what’s the TransLit club? It’s a mass-commuter reading group (a variation of Seattle’s Books on the Bus Club) in which participating straphangers read designated books. The inaugural book will be Andy Greenberg’s book on WikiLeaks, This Machine Kills Secrets.

Kevin Powers has won the Guardian’s first-book award for Yellow Birds, his novel about a gunner in Iraq. Powers spent two years serving with the army in Iraq, and took the title of his novel from a marching song he learned there: "A yellow bird / With a yellow bill / Was perched upon/ my windowsill / I lured him in / With a piece of bread / And then I smashed / His fucking head."

At the New York Review of Books, Gabriel Winslow-Yost accesses Chris Ware’s collected works, and makes a compelling case for the triumph of the “comic-book novel.”

Mergers are not good for publishing, André Schiffrin, author of titles such as The Business of Books and A Political Education, argues at the Nation. While proponents usually argue that bigger publishers will be better equipped to battle Amazon, Schiffin counters that over the past few decades, the rise of mergers has meant the disappearance of independent bookstores and the decline in independent books.

On the heels of Flavorwire’s list of New York’s 100 Most Important Living Writers (spoiler alert: Philip Roth is number one), HTML Giant offers up its list of New York’s 100 Most Important Rats Living in the Subway System.

Bob Saget, who used to host America's Funniest Home Videos, is writing a dirty book. We’re kind of excited about it.