paper trail

Dec 7, 2011 @ 4:00:00 am

David Guterson, photo by Sean Smith.

So far we’re enjoying what HTML Giant is calling its Tournament of Bookshit week, a skewed competition that will play out in NCAA-style brackets between literary (and not-so-literary) topics. This year's topics include “magic realism” vs. “living in Brooklyn,” and “talking shit about the New Yorker while submitting frequently to NYer” vs. “dream sequence w/ talking animals.”

And now, for a dissenting view: Margaret Atwood says Twitter inspires people to write better and read more books.

David Guterson has won the bad sex in fiction award.

Why are long-form profiles from 1995 the latest must-read articles in Washington? Because Newt is back in town: Garry Wills on Gingrich’s feud with Barney Frank from the New York Review of Books, and Connie Bruck’s New Yorker portrait of the politician (registration required) remind us that some things never change. As Wills wrote that fateful year: “Gingrich became what his gurus, Alvin and Heidi Toffler, say the future will make most of us, “a modular person,” an assemblage of “modules” to be adapted, tried out, rejected, recombined in a constant adaptation to new surroundings.”

How should publishers treat book bloggers? Like print reviewers? The LA Times’s Carolyn Kellogg invites you to discuss.