• “The Legend of Colton H. Bryant” by Alexandra Fuller
from The Boston Globe
This “is a highly unusual [book], difficult to categorize. It might be seen as investigative journalism, a meditation on the American West, or an ambitious, epic prose poem about one man’s tragic death. Whatever its genre, it is beautifully crafted and suffused with an unspoken desire for a better world.”

• “Rancid Pansies” by James Hamilton-Patterson
from The Financial Times
This Booker-winning writer is comedic king of mordant wit with a special talent for Italy and the most perverse cooking imaginable.  You’ll love him and you’ll hate him but you’ll be laughing too hard to know which for certain.

• “The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War” by David Lebedoff
from The Australian
Deliciously snotty review: The author, “deceived by the fact that he and his subjects speak the same language, keeps missing the point. He can read music but he’s tone deaf.”

• “Home" by Marilynne Robinson
from The Washington Post
“As a disquisition on the agonies of family love and serial disappointment, Home, is sometimes too illuminating to bear.”

• “Fine Just the Way It Is” by Annie Proulx
from The New York Times
“Bears Proulx’s brand of hard drama, hard irony, hard weather, and hard and soft characters blown about and many times destroyed by the powerful mix. Her sense of story is admirable, her sentences are artful, and she writes like a demon. She has nicely disrupted the mythology of the Old West.”

• “The Nineteenth Wife” by David Ebershoff
from Newsday
This novel "is a compelling portrait of the beginnings and ends of Mormon polygamy, and a marvelous examination of its effects on women (the obvious sufferers) and men (also brutalized, the author shows). The 19th Wife is an exploration of how and whether community is possible after a loss of belief.”

Robert Giroux—once editor-in-chief of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, and easily one of the most notable editors in American publishing history, died in his sleep. He was 94.

Andy Ihnatko at Macworld has a different angle on the iPhone/Kindle situation. Rather than simply seeing Apple as potentially deciding to compete with Kindle, he suggests a partnership. I’m far from the first to say that I won’t truly be happy until I can download books from the iTunes store as easily as I can download music (or audiobooks, for that matter), so I’m all for any way to get it done. Why Jobs continues to resist the whole market segment is a great mystery. (via)

Wired has an unusual “experiment” going on: a profile of a profile of Charlie Kaufman. It’s basically a blow-by-blow of how a magazine feature makes it from pitch to page. A Charlie Kaufman profile is obviously an interesting choice for this—like one of his films, there’s no telling which way it might go. (via)

Novelist and comic-book writer Brad Meltzer has been inspired by Superman and his creator, Jerry Siegel, on many levels. PW has the story of his serendipitous 2006 encounter with Siegel’s niece, who introduced him to the Siegel family and let him in on some compelling family history. Meltzer wound up basing his new novel, The Book of Lies, on the Siegels, but along the way, he also found Siegel’s childhood home in a ruinous state. Now, with the help of friends like Chip Kidd and Neil Gaiman, he’s taking action to preserve the house where Superman was born. GalleyCat has more on that, along with the inspirational-promotional video Meltzer and friends have produced.

The Guardian takes a look at Travelodge’s top ten most discarded books in hotel rooms this summer. I love that the hotel chain keeps—and publishes!—a list.

Philip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, lists his forty favorite books and explains his choices in the London Times:

Choosing 40 books, however, is a different matter. That is not as much as 400 or 4,000, to be sure, but it’s enough to let you establish a sort of settled personal canon ... or is it? Because it would be quite easy to choose 40 poets, as I very soon realised. Or 40 19th-century novels. Or 40 books about science. Or 40 books about great painters, lavishly illustrated. Damn! I wanted them all! What should be my principle here?

Well, it had to be variety, of course. I also thought I should avoid too many obvious classics. Was there much point in recommending Middlemarch or Hamlet? I thought that people could be trusted to find their way to those without my help. Another constraint was that the books had to be in print, which ruled out any of the 16 novels of the, to my mind, inexplicably forgotten writer Macdonald Harris, an American who died in 1993, and whose The Balloonist, at least, should be available.

Personally, Middlemarch would make my list despite its obviousness. But I admit I would never have thought of The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh.

In the Sonoma town of Glen Ellen, Michelle Green goes looking for Last House, the last house MFK Fisher lived in, which is now owned by the Audubon Society and isn’t found on any Glen Ellen Historical Society map.

Library of America has released the work of William Maxwell in two volumes (Early Novels and Stories and Later Novels and Stories), prompting this appreciation of the illustrious Maxwell by John Updike for The New Yorker.

It’s a great year to be a vampire. Joss Whedon is continuing the Angel and Buffy the Vampire Slayer series in comic book form; Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight was one of the most highly anticipated books this summer; and this Sunday Alan Ball (of Six Feet Under fame) is bringing Charlaine Harris’s series about vampires in Louisiana to television. The first book in the series is Dead Until Dark, and apparently involves a mindreader named Sookie who is having an affair with a vampire.

I haven’t yet read the books, although I’m thinking maybe I should, but I am really eager to see what Alan Ball does with them. Here’s what he told Salon about the series:

One of the real seed issues at the base of a lot of humanity’s psychic suffering is the denial of death. I certainly think the idea of death makes that a little more palatable. It softens it, especially as vampires have evolved into the reluctant vampire, the vampire who has ambivalence, who doesn’t want to be a vampire, who yearns for humanity. Certainly the idea of being immortal has always been attractive to the human psyche. I think we fear oblivion and ending more than anything else. I also think there’s obviously something very erotic about it—the penetration, the merging of bodily fluids, of course it’s a huge metaphor for sex. Also, we’ve all known people who have sucked the life out of us. That’s all part of why it’s such an enduring idea.

Stephenie Meyer has posted on her website that she’s not sure what she’ll do about the next installment of her Twilight saga, since a rough draft of the next book was published online without her permission. Rather than force her fans to go looking for the bootleg copy, she’s republished it herself, and put the project in a drawer—at least for the time being. She does make it clear, though, that she knows who leaked it, and notes that it’s a clear-cut copyright violation (which she terms “dishonest") without ever suggesting the possibility of a lawsuit. So it remains to be seen what might come of that, as well as of the book itself. 

Among the many revelations over the past four days about the formerly unknown governor of Alaska is the fact that she’s not exactly a free speech proponent. When she went on a firing spree after winning her first mayoral election, her targets included the police chief and librarian, both of whom had supported her opponent, and both of whom had their loyalty to Palin and her causes questioned. A Time story contains this tidbit:

Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. “She asked the library how she could go about banning books,” he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. “The librarian was aghast.”

The librarian made some undisclosed concessions and wound up keeping her job, but it’s unclear whether Palin actually had any books removed from the library. For a contemporaneous article about the events, see the Anchorage Daily News.

In honor of the fortieth anniversary of the Man Booker Prize, the Telegraph provides a brief history of its early years:

After Roy Jenkins, the former Chancellor, had handed John Berger the 1972 trophy and cheque for his novel, G, the writer announced that he intended to ‘share the prize with those West Indians in and from the Caribbean who are fighting to put an end to their exploitation.’ Half the £5,000 - but not half the trophy - was destined for the Black Panther movement, whose declared aim was to ‘expropriate’ all enterprises such as those of Booker in the Caribbean. It would be fair to say that, as far as the assembled media were concerned, all hell broke loose. And yet, in a confidential minute of a meeting the following month, the company was reported to be ‘undisturbed by the publicity which accrued from Mr Berger’s gesture’ and remained committed to its seven-year sponsorship. However, it was felt that the trophy was both too tall and too heavy, so a scaled-down version was commissioned.

John Berger is on the longlist again this year for From A to X. Who knows what he’ll do if he wins this year? Perhaps all hell will break loose again. We’ll find out if he makes the shortlist when it is announced one week from today.

Slate recommends companion reading for the Republican National Convention. I heartily second their recommendation of Robert Timberg’s The Nightingale’s Song, which follows not only John McCain but John Poindexter, Bud McFarlane, Jim Webb, and Oliver North. A fascinating and well-written book.

And given the circumstances, I’d like to add a book to Slate’s list: Douglas Brinkley’s account of Hurricane Katrina, The Great Deluge.

The Independent profiles my very favorite crime writer, P. D. James, whose latest Adam Dalgliesh novel, The Private Patient, will be published this fall:

Phyllis Dorothy James, whose second child (Jane, for Jane Austen, a lifelong heroine) was born as doodlebugs dropped in a fatal hail around Queen Charlotte’s Hospital in 1944, turned 88 this month. Until last year, she recalls, “I was extraordinarily lucky with health. I really didn’t feel particularly old… We don’t grow gradually into old age. Throughout our lives, we’re on a plateau and then suddenly, whoosh! We’re five years older, and then we’re on a plateau again.” She hit another plateau when, after a hip replacement, she suffered heart failure.

“Suddenly I realised that I was old and this was a condition that couldn’t be cured, but had to be lived with.”

She may be living with the condition of being old, but she’s not ruling out the possibility of more books. And she looks darn good for 88.