Book Quote: “This was what was keeping me awake at night. This fragmentation. Because it’s the same problem everywhere. It’s like the internet, or cable TV—there’s never any center, there’s no communal agreement, there’s just a trillion little bits of distracting noise. We can never sit down and have any sustained conversation, it’s all just cheap trash and shitty development. All the real things, the authentic things, the... 

Who says you can't teach an old media dog new tricks? Over at the Washington Post , fiction critic Ron Charles tries his hand at a video adaptation of his review of Mona Simpson's My Hollywood (which I linked to, the old-fashioned way, in Old Media Monday last night): What do you think? I have to say he did us scribes proud, with his confident line readings and his David Pogue-style willingness to go beyond the mere talkingheaddom of, say,... 

With so many reviews of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom coming out this week (and so many of them by men named “Sam”) in advance of its publication next Tuesday, and with its general anointedness, from Time to the president , as the Book of the Moment (and even the Book That Might Just Save Literature), I thought we could begin tonight's roundup with special Freedom survey, following last week's Kakutani rave : On Freedom : Sam... 

Book Quote: “Dr. Amnesty’s cartridges, the South African Museum, Harold’s fossils, Chefe Carpenter’s collection, Alma’s memory wall – weren’t they all ways of trying to defy erasure? What is memory anyway? How can it be such a frail, perishable thing?” Book Review: Review by Jill I. Shtulman (AUG 20, 2010) Aldous Huxley once famously said, “Every man’s memory is his private literature.”... 

Book Quote: “I just don’t know,”  he said aloud. “Roy, are you awake?” “Yes”. “God, I just don’t know.” That was our last communication. I didn’t know, either, and I wanted only to shrink farther down into my sleeping bag. He had a terrific pain in his head that painkillers couldn’t reach, an airiness in his voice that was only becoming more hollow, and other mysteries of despair I didn’t want to see or hear. I knew... 

Book Quote: “I think when the dust settles and the Bipartisans are history that’s how we’re going to live, as small units who don’t agree. I don’t know what we’ll call it, political parties, military councils, city-states, but that’s how it’s going to be and we’re not going to screw it up this time. It’ll be like 1776 all over again. Act Two for America.” Book Review: Review by Poornima Apte (AUG 2, 2010) It’s... 

I always look forward to my daily dose of aesthetic inspiration from Design*Sponge, and I'm still ruminating on yesterday's typically gorgeous post on tables and cameras made of cool old hardcover books . Since the news that Amazon's digital sales now outpace hardcovers , I've been obsessing more than usual about the fate of physical books, wondering how long it'll be before my own dense shelves start to look like curio cabinets.... 

Freckleface Strawberry on Stage: Julianne Moore 's popular picture book, Freckleface Strawberry , is set to be turned into a family-friendly musical . The show will officially open in October. In the Jailhouse Now: Former prison librarian Avi Steinberg offers his humble (and eclectic) recommended reading list for Big House-bound celebrity Lindsay Lohan. [ The Daily Beast ] A Cleary Classic: Ramona and Beezus , the big screen adaptation of Beverly... 

Aside from a short trip down the rabbit hole with Sid Meier's world-building sim Civilization III back in the late '90s (see below), I've largely let the last two decades of video game culture pass me by. Not really out of distaste or even disinterest–I think in part I was (and still am) afraid of what would happen if I let myself get swallowed by the machine. Would I still be a functioning member of society? Would I ever read... 

With a day to reflect, many more appreciations of the late Harvey Pekar have come in, and I wanted to pass a few along. As promised yesterday , Eric Reynolds of Fantagraphics put up a long post , crediting Pekar, a man he mostly knew later in life for his grouchy phone calls about various business matters, with opening him up to the comics that became his life: To my increasingly cynical yet culture-starved mind, Pekar was as formative an influence... 

Earlier this year, I reviewed Dexter Palmer 's The Dream of Perpetual Motion for the New York Times Book Review . It's an impressive debut that, as I wrote,”takes elements from Nabokov, Neal Stephenson, Steven Millhauser, and The Tempest, tosses them into a retro-futuristic blender and hits 'purée.' The result is….sophisticated, subversive entertainment that never settles for escapism.” What's it about? Palmer  Read More →

Ladies and gentlemen of Brooklyn and Iowa City: the bus has left Port Authority, and if you're not on it, well, I would say “Better luck next time,” except that next time you'll probably be too old: the New Yorker has announced their once-a-decade-or-so “20 Under 40″ list of the best young fiction writers. (If, like me, you're already chronologically ineligible for such an honor (to say nothing of the talent... 

If you're in the book business, your inbox was filled up all last week with reports from this year's BookExpo America (posted by many of the same people you were elbowing past in the crowded aisles). If you want to catch up on what the talk was apparently about, you can check out show summaries and dispatches from Jacket Copy , Publishers Weekly , and the Associated Press . But everyone's show is different, and mine was largely spent... 

Book Quote: “In Il Libro dell’Arte, Cenninni teaches us how to paint wounds, using unalloyed vermillion as the base, and lac resin applied sparingly, so the blood continues to shine…. I have often wondered if the condition of death is perhaps less grave to the human anatomy than physical injuries. For in death there is release from suffering.   Sadly, the master craftsman is unable to instruct us in the healing of wounds.” Book Review:... 

Today, sword-and-sorcery fans and art aficionados mourned the news that Frank Frazetta passed away at the age of 82. The American born artist made his iconic mark in the 1960s and 70s, crafting legendary covers for Robert E. Howard 's Conan paperbacks, as well as comics work for Creepy and Eerie , among many other fantasy-tinged outlets. His musclebound, armor-clad heroes, nightmarish monsters, and vampy damsels thrilled genre fans, who responded...