Joshua Mohr’s second novel returns to the seedy side of San Francisco, where the addicted and the lost search for redemption. …more

A crime novel set in a fictional Mexican city delves into the unsolved murders of two decades. …more

Poet, artist, and punk-rock legend Patti Smith sat down last week with journalist Amy Goodman to discuss, among other things, Smith’s memoir Just Kids—reviewed by us in February—about her life and friendship with the late artist Robert Mapplethorpe.

Smith was interviewed before a live audience and parts aired on Goodman’s Democracy Now! program. It is a funny, serious, and very entertaining interview. …more

Austrian writer Peter Handke begins his 1972 novel Short Letter, Long Farewell with the following:

“Jefferson Street is a quiet thoroughfare in Providence. It circles around the business section, changes its name to Norwich Street in the South End, and leads into the old Boston Post Road. Here and there Jefferson Street widens into small squares bordered by beech and maple trees. …more

“The most ambitious solution would transform Google’s digital database into a truly public library.”

“That, of course, would require an act of Congress, one that would make a decisive break with the American habit of determining public issues by private lawsuit. The legislation would have to settle ancillary problems—how to adjust copyright, deal with orphan books, and compensate Google for its investment in digitizing—but it would have the advantage of clearing up a messy legal landscape and of giving the American people what they deserve: a national digital library equal to the needs of the twenty-first century. […] We are agreed that something must be done to improve the nation’s health. Why not do something to enrich its culture?”

-Robert Darnton from Harvard University has a good summary of the Google Book Search situation and some interesting ideas on how to settle it in “Google and the New Digital Future.”

If you won’t read a newspaper on a New York City subway, where will you read it? As zeitgeist, as canary in the mine, the habits of New York subway riders signal the end of print newspapers. …more

I just had another read of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, because I admire it and because I sought two specific paragraphs from the novel. I wanted to read them again.

With our everydayness so saturated with news media and opinion (even for those who don’t want it to be prominent in their lives, nor own a television), I thought the time might be right to reread these graphs. I found them fast enough. They come soon after the narrator Binx Bolling, a moviegoing Louisiana stockbroker, attends his office’s weekly lunchtime sales conference. …more