paper trail

Nov 10, 2011 @ 4:00:00 am

Jonathan Lethem, Jennifer Egan, and Lynn Nottage at Occupy Wall Street.

Christopher Hitchens is dominating a Publisher’s Weekly readers poll for favorite book of the year. His essay collection Arguably has garnered 91.55 percent of the votes. Aside from the “other” category (2.63%), the closest contender is Tina Fey’s Bossypants (1.83%). Meanwhile, The Marriage Plot hasn’t even broken the 1 percent barrier.

Novelists Jonathan Lethem and Jennifer Egan and playwright Lynn Nottage held forth at Occupy Wall Street this week, with Lethem telling the crowd: “Even those who sneer or berate . . . they’re one of you—one of us—just not willing—not yet—to see it.” Today, authors including Josh Cohen, Eileen Myles, and Adam Wilson will read from the Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener,” which includes, in addition to its much repeated mantra, “I would prefer not to,” this instructive line in civil disobedience: “Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance.”

In The Los Angeles Review of Books, an in-depth look at the decline of the Los Angeles Times under owner Sam Zell, who once told staffers at the slumping paper: “I am your Viagra."

Uncovering Amazon.”

New Yorkers: Tonight, White Columns and Performa are co-hosting Psychedelic Noir, an event featuring readings—by pamphleteer-novelist Stewart Home and fiction writer Lynne Tillman, among others—as well as “book shredding, ventriloquism, and verbal acrobatics.”