Yesterday on the Powell’s Books blog, Jason Fagone put up a worthy post about the first magazine story that blew his mind.

National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation recently ran a piece on an interesting nonfiction title, Jonathan Wright’s The Ambassadors: From Ancient Greece to Renaissance Europe, the Men Who Introduced the World to Itself.

The study seems to be full of holes to me, such as the following attempt to divorce reading skills from writing skills:

Yet the study also found that the program did not help improve students’ scores on the city’s standardized English language arts test, a result that the study’s creators said they could not fully explain. They suggested that the disparity might be related to the fact that the standardized test is written while the study’s interviews were oral.

Read the rest of the article at The New York Times.

Why is summer seen as the time to charge fearlessly onto the public stage with a stack of “guilty pleasure” books under one’s arm?

Yet another article, this one at The Washington Post, serves up the genre fiction:

Unlike many other genre series, mysteries are often better the second, third or 15th time out. The best authors deepen their detectives, turn caricature sketches into character studies and hone familiar rhythms until a P.I. or an amateur sleuth feels like an old friend. Their cities evolve from generic backgrounds into bas-relief; supporting characters evolve from human props to essential sidekicks with their own inner lives.

Gardam explains the title on the first page, so nothing will be spoiled for potential readers by recounting it now. An elderly man has just left his table at the Benchers’ luncheon room in London’s Inner Temple. Several jurists discuss the departed figure, who looked familiar. The Common Sergeant knows why: “It was Old Filth. Great advocate, judge and–bit of a wit. Said to have invented FILTH–failed in London Try Hong Kong. He tried Hong Kong.”

Read the rest of the review at The New York Times.

Highly recommended.

I am not sure that I agree with the premise of the segment, part of National Public Radio’s Summer Reading series, but it is almost always fun to listen to Nancy Pearl, a Seattle librarian whose enthusiasm regularly reminds me why I do what I do.

When Steve Mandel, a management trainer from Santa Cruz, Calif., wants to show his friends why he stays up late to peer through a telescope, he pulls out a copy of his latest book, “Light in the Sky,” filled with pictures he has taken of distant nebulae, star clusters and galaxies.

“I consistently get a very big ‘Wow!’ The printing of my photos was spectacular–I did not really expect them to come out so well.” he said. “This is as good as any book in a bookstore.”

Read the rest of the article at The New York Times.

When last spotted, at the end of his memoir “How to Lose Friends and Alienate People,” Toby Young was slinking out of Manhattan, a ruined man. Fired as an editor at Vanity Fair and banished from the Eden of American celebrity culture, he threw in the towel and returned to London.

Read the rest of the article at The New York Times.

When fame finally came to him–fame, that is, in the tiny, hermetic world of American literary fiction and its great sideshow, the lecture-and-workshop circuit–Maryann didn’t much like what it turned him into: “the Important American Writer.”

Read the rest of the article at The Washington Post.

Recommended with reservations.

This is a fine example of why I believe most how-to-write books are claptrap. I’ve never felt that a writer has any responsibility to his readers except to do the best work he’s capable of. Of course that includes some sub-rules–being true to the characters, not cheating on the plot–but if he spends time thinking about what the readers want, he’ll end up writing for them, not for himself. A writer who doesn’t write first and foremost for himself is unlikely to satisfy anyone else.

Read the rest of the post at Poppy Z. Brite’s blog.

A copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio was sold at auction for $5 million.

Michel Faber writes:

Fast forward to 2005, when I got an email from Eno entitled Chillout Music. Jamie Byng had told him there were plans for a CD of me reading my story The Fahrenheit Twins. “He asked me whether I’d like to … he didn’t finish the sentence before I said: ‘Yes.’”

Read the rest of the article at The Guardian.

The one job I never left was writing my novel. Unfortunately, it left me. Two hundred pages into it. My computer crashed and died–and my novel died with it.

I was left in the precarious position of starting over or giving up.

I started over.

Read the rest of the post at Powell’s Books blog.

It amazes me that people who claim to love books assume that we’re all secretly reading or secretly wishing to read trash.

Read the rest of this worthy post at This Space.

One day in March, 2005, the phone rang in the studio of a loose collective of Winnipeg historians-turned-video-artists known as L’Atelier national du Manitoba. An employee at CKY, the Winnipeg CTV affiliate, was calling to report a cornucopia of potential artistic source material: Because CKY was moving to a new location, 1980s footage of the now-vanished Winnipeg Jets hockey team (some tapes no longer easily viewed because of changed technology) was destined for the dumpster. “Better you guys should take it and do something with it, otherwise it’s just going to waste,” the employee told them.

Read the rest of the article at the Globe and Mail.

Linguist Geoff Nunberg appeared on Fresh Air today to discuss his book Talking Right.

Listen to the interview at National Public Radio.

When I found the book store, it was quiet as a morgue. . .I passed the time–and time passes slowly in Arkansas–chatting with the store clerks, one of whom let slip that I was competing not only with the chili cooking contest, but also with the annual football game between the Arkansas Razorbacks and the Oklahoma Sooners. . .Nobody ever showed up to hear me read.

Read the rest of the article at The Denver Post.

The three-day conference here drew the backing of the singer-songwriter Gilberto Gil, who is also Brazil’s culture minister and an advocate of overhauling the global copyright system. Mr. Gil was a founder of the Tropicalist movement, which used cut-and-paste, mix-and-match techniques as early as the 1960’s, long before digital sampling became commonplace.

Read the rest of the article at The New York Times.

The Washington Post has a transcript of its recent live online discussion with Ron Suskind, the author of The One Percent Doctrine.