John Grisham has written a forceful op-ed in the New York Times attacking the Obama administration for its handling of Guantanamo Bay and the ongoing human-rights abuses that have been taking place there. Grisham came to the issue after learning that his books had been forbidden to detainees.
Many months ago, Bret Easton Ellis agreed to review the book of anybody who donated $5,000 to his Kickstarter-funded film The Canyons (starring Lindsay Lohan and James Deen). Last week, Vice ran the first of the reviews, a mainly positive take on Pablo D’Stair’s novel Regard.
Parks and Rec star Nick Offerman has a special treat for students who haven’t finished their summer reading assignments: A video in which he provides one-sentence summaries of classic books. Animal Farm, for example, is “like the movie Babe: Pig in the City, but in the end, it turns out Communism is bad.”
Time profiles a summer camp in Key Largo, Florida, that’s inspired by the Hunger Games series: “While the books focus on the harrowing ordeal of 16-year old Katniss Everdeen who is forced to fight gladiator-style against other teenage killers in a frightening glimpse at a dystopian future, at summer camp, the games are more akin to flag football.”
A book about giving up sex for twelve years that was a bestseller in France is now coming out in the UK. Sophie Fontanel tells theTelegraph that she wrote The Art of Sleeping Alone after coming to the conclusion that “no sex... was preferable to bad sex.”
Every summer, New Yorker staffer Ken Auletta organizes a softball game for artists and writers in the Hamptons to raise money for various Long Island organizations. Auletta talks with the Times about scheduling the game, and the ways to spot a good softball player: “I will get e-mails from people that I don’t know telling me what wonderful softball players they are. Now anyone who tells you they’re a wonderful softball player usually is not.”
