Two weeks ago, the American Booksellers Association, an organization of independent booksellers, asked the Justice Department to investigate what it describes as “illegal predatory pricing” by big-box retailers Amazon.com, Wal-Mart, and Target. The price war began on October 15 when Wal-Mart.com slashed prices on new hardcover bestsellers, including books by John Grisham, Stephen King, Barbara Kingsolver, Sarah Palin, and James Patterson. …more

Tao Lin’s characters are constantly connected, yet physically detached. The technology they live and breathe often seems less mechanical than its users. …more

Three generations of women cope with isolation, grief, and sex, in the first novel by the celebrated story writer, Rachel Sherman. …more

We’re catching up with Shya Scanlon halfway through the serialization of his novel, Forecast, across 42 web journals and blogs.

The Rumpus: How is the serialization going? How are people responding to it? Are they following the novel across its different web outlets? …more

Former Army reservist Lynndie England, the international face of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, is suing her biographer for seizing control of what was intended to be a shared copyright. In July, writer Gary S. Winkler abruptly resigned from the limited liability corporation established to handle finances and formed his own. …more

Brandon Scott Gorrell’s debut collection, During My Nervous Breakdown I Want to Have a Biographer Present is an anxious, ambivalent ode to Internet culture. …more

Tamler Sommers of The Believer recently interviewed Dr. Phil Zimbardo about his infamous Stanford Prison Experiment.

The 1971 experiment randomly assigned intelligent, normal, healthy young men to the role of prisoner or guard. What began as an investigation into the psychology of prison life quickly spun out of control. …more

Salon laid off six of its 29 editorial staffers last week in an effort–according to CEO Richard Gingras’ statement to Gawker–to become “more of a true Web publication.” According to Gingras, the layoffs are tied to a fall relaunch of the site and a redesign of its backend CMS. …more

Amazon, we’re still mad at you.

Last week, the company once again stirred waves of customer indignation when it remotely deleted copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from users’ Kindles.

The Rumpus covered the story here and here. …more

The Rome Review, Washington DC’s new literary magazine, released its inaugural issue on June 27. The issue features work from Daniel Wallace, Blake Butler, Kathleen Rooney, and David Means, as well as photography from Jonathan Goley, Thomas Sayers Ellis, and Juliane E. Min.

Founded by Editor Tarek Al-Hariri and Assistant Editors Blake Gaines and Gregory Nanni, the magazine joins Washington DC’s growing literary and arts scene and intends to present a progressive face of the arts and letters.

Why the Rome Review? “As a seat of power, Washington is arguably the most powerful city in the free world,” Al-Hariri said, “it attracts politicians, lobbyists, and all sorts of corporate interests: it is a modern-day Rome.”

Beginning this Thursday, Shya Scanlon will be serializing his sci-fi novel, Forecast, in semi-weekly installments across 42 web journals and blogs.

Forecast is a sci-fi tale of relationships and identity under constant surveillance. The novel opens in a world where the weather has gone berserk, and electricity is created out of negative human emotion. Here we meet Helen, the suburban wife of a lying weatherman, who watches her neighbor’s yard through the “Window” function of her TV and considers wearing her Anti-Surveillance Mask to turn on her husband after work: …more

I attended a Scientology service a few years ago as part of a Stanford psych course taught by Phil Zimbardo. My assignment was to act as a target of social influence, to evaluate the techniques that Scientology used to recruit new members, and the situational factors that made ordinary people susceptible to joining. …more

Sy Hersh would be proud: the Associated Press announced last Saturday that it will distribute watchdog and investigative journalism from four leading nonprofit organizations to its 1,500 member newspapers. The deal will widen distribution of the groups’ work while addressing a need created by newspapers’ shrinking resources. …more

The Annenberg Space for Photography opened its doors in Los Angeles on March 27, 2009. Tucked among the high-rises of Century City, the sleek, one-story structure houses a digital projection gallery whose interior design was influenced by the mechanics of a camera and its lens. …more

Rumpus contributor Steven Tagle has entered this film in Project Pushback, a competition to produce fresh messaging in support of the freedom to marry. If you like “A Friend’s Take,” please take a second to create a free user account on vimeo.com and vote for the film.

Here’s how to vote:
1. Create a free user account on vimeo.com.
(Please note, you must have a Vimeo account in order to vote.)
2. Vote for “A Friend’s Take” by clicking the heart-shaped “LIKE” button in the top-right corner of the video screen.

First Dan Baum’s Twitter missives and now this: The Brandon Book Crisis, a paperback “thriller” about book design featuring 140+ pages of unedited Gmail chats, text messages, voicemails, and emails between Brandon Scott Gorrell, Tao Lin, and others. …more

Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour “Sy” Hersh presided over the inauguration of the New England Center for Investigative Reporting at Boston University, a non-profit, university-based organization dedicated to training the next generation of investigative reporters. …more

Quentin Tarantino’s new film, the mysteriously misspelled Inglourious Basterds, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last week to mixed reviews. According to Tarantino, the film is a comic revenge fantasy about “the power of cinema bringing down the Third Reich.” …more

The Gregory Brothers, a Brooklyn-based quartet, remix speeches and news clips using an audio processor called Auto-Tune to create catchy musical news mash-ups that Rachel Maddow dubs “newsicals.” By auto-tuning the voices of politicians, pundits, and TV journalists like Katie Couric, the Gregory Brothers have produced a YouTube phenomenon that makes history accessible and entertaining to people who might not ordinarily tune in to news shows or the History Channel.

The Gregory Brothers’ Auto-Tune the News #3 was featured in The Rumpus Video Interruption section this weekend.

I spoke with the Gregory Brothers (Michael, Andrew, Evan, and Evan’s wife Sarah) via email to find out more about the process of making an Auto-Tune segment. …more

Over the past few days, ex-New Yorker staff writer Dan Baum has received a lot of attention by rehashing the details of his dismissal in 140-character Twitter missives.

I spoke with Dan Baum via email about his decision to use Twitter as the form for his tale. …more

Following Stephen Elliot’s post http://bit.ly/32Mt06, I began covering Dan Baum’s Twitter story relatively late in the game,

three days after his first tweet about being fired from The New Yorker.

May 8, 10:46am: “People often ask why I left the New Yorker. After all, I had a staff writer job. Isn’t that the best job in journalism?”

By the time I arrived @danielsbaum on May 11, I had to hit the “more” button 8 times to find the beginning of his story. …more

You think writers have it tough. Actors are all outward, public, on display. They don’t have words to hide behind. Every Little Step, a documentary directed by James D. Stern and Adam Del Deo, is meta-theatre at its best, a film about dancers struggling through auditions for the 2006 Broadway revival of A Chorus Line. …more

There are reasons why parents tell their kids not to talk to strangers. One might be reading “Hurt People” by Cote Smith, a debut story in Issue 118 of One Story. Set in a town “with more prisons than restaurants,” the story begins when two fatherless boys meet a stranger swimming in their apartment’s pool. …more