If readers come to believe that the value of a new book is $10, publishing as we know it is over. If you can buy Stephen King’s new novel or John Grisham’s ‘Ford County’ for $10, why would you buy a brilliant first novel for $25? I think we underestimate the effect to which extremely discounted best sellers take the consumer’s attention away from emerging writers.

Others, like Jeff Jacoby of The Boston Globe, view the price war as “spirited competition” that has spurred sales and “increased the appetite for books.” Independent booksellers, he said, should play to their strengths: “attentive and knowledgeable service, eye-catching displays, a reader- and author-friendly atmosphere, community involvement, the serendipitous joys of browsing.” And in The Atlantic, Megan McArdle wrote, “the interest of antitrust law does not lie in protecting small, inefficient sellers for the tiny minority of Americans who prefer to shop there.” The big players are competing with each other, McArdle said, and this is where the market is going to end up anyway, “because outside of a few big cities, independent booksellers can’t compete with the convenience of Amazon or Barnes and Nobles’ economies of scale.” Bill Petrocelli, an ABA member and co-owner of Book Passage in San Francisco and Corte Madera, addressed a larger concern: that what appears to be a simple price war is really a fight over what you get to read.

Some readers think that if their favorite store closes they can always buy the book they want somewhere else. But that’s a dangerous delusion — the books they want may not be there at all. In fact, these types of disruptions in how books are sold or distributed have a profound effect on what publishers decide to publish in the first place. … But when the system is dominated by a small handful of powerful buyers, their decision can make or break a book. … One of the dirty little secrets of the book business is that publishers often check in advance with the buyers for the chain stores and mass merchandisers before agreeing to publish a book. If the answer they get is no, the book may never see the light of day.

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For an indie novella, the opening paragraph of Tao Lin’s autobiographical new book, Shoplifting from American Apparel, is conspicuously branded: Microsoft Word, eBay, and Gmail chat all appear within the first 130 words.

The Internet is the purview of young writers, the first generation to grow up in the blue glow of a computer screen, to whom a broadband connection is as essential as running water or electricity; Lin and his cohort give credence to the theory that this generation is addicted to the high of being wired. Indeed, Shoplifting is as much an exploration of the state of mind propagated by constant Internet use as an examination of the technology itself.

The novella spans two meandering years in the life of Sam, a “young, hip writer with a cultish following,” and explores many of the contradictions inherent in the Internet age. Lin’s characters are constantly connected, yet physically detached. They’re garrulous self-promoters, but guarded in their personal relationships. Despite all the talking, Sam and his friends seem cryptic, bored, and ultimately unknowable; oftentimes, the technology they live and breathe seems less mechanical than its users.

Lin’s minimalist tone is exemplified by his repeated use of the adjective-plus-“facial expression” construction: “She walked to the back of the kitchen, leaned against a counter, and looked at Sam with a neutral facial expression. Sam felt that his face displayed no reaction.” This is Lin’s Model T descriptor: interchangeable, generic, one size fits all. The plot of Shoplifting is similarly repetitive, according to Lin, “2 parts shoplifting arrest, 5 parts vague relationship issues.” What does the book gain from such repetition? Not character development—Sam’s reaction to each arrest or “vague relationship” is essentially the same. This resistance to change mimics real life, where changes creep slowly and invisibly until they catch you off guard.

Tao Lin

Sam and his friends are self-proclaimed bohemians: “Their shoes were shit, they couldn’t afford haircuts, they were stealing to stay alive, living off of strippers to create their art…” Yet Sam’s shoplifting is motivated less by need than by distraction, the thefts performed so coolly they’re almost subconscious. In an interview with New York magazine, Lin commented that he used to support himself by shoplifting, seeing himself as an organic Robin Hood: “If I shoplifted from corporations and sold it on eBay and then spent all my money on the best venues possible, like independent organic vegan grocery stores or restaurants, then that would be, like, improving the world.” This all sounds fine, but Sam’s shoplifting reads like a crime of boredom. At the police station, he hums with bourgeois thrill. This is how the other half lives. This is the grit and squalor he’s been looking for.

Throughout the novella, Sam treats the reader like a stranger he has friended on Facebook—keeping us at arm’s length while sporadically sending us updates about his life. The narration often elides important decisions or thought processes, then surprises with their outcome—both in Sam’s shoplifting and in his relationships. In one sentence, Sam is browsing the racks at American Apparel. In the next, he “walked out of American Apparel holding an American Apparel shirt.” You don’t even know he has stolen the shirt until an undercover cop apprehends him.

Romantic interests crop up just as suddenly, gracing a few pages and then disappearing, never to be seen or heard from again. “Sam noticed someone smiling at them and realized that for an amount of time he had not been aware of anything but what he and Sheila were doing.” After a section break, this character who so dominated Sam’s attention is out of the game: “Four months later Sam was living in his brother’s studio apartment in Manhattan, sleeping on a mattress pad. He had not seen Sheila who now lived in Brooklyn in about two months.”

The drama occurs in section breaks and between sentences, where Sam’s most revealing decisions are made. But either Sam doesn’t trust the reader, or else the narrative withholds this information in an attempt to shock. Oftentimes, Sam withholds important information from other characters as well, bandying about until they press him—that is, until he gets “caught.” Then he’s happy to oblige, as when a woman stops him and asks to see his headphones: “‘You caught me,’ said Sam grinning. ‘They’re from this store.’”

Critics debate whether Internet culture has influenced young writers for better or worse, whether the Internet itself is a sufficiently “literary” concern. Is writing about the web still a novelty, or is it more? Has it ruined our generation? Ultimately, Shoplifting from American Apparel supports the more traditional view about the medium: that cyberspace is both home and birthplace to the disaffected, lonely, and depressed.

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If you ever find yourself as the lead in a Rachel Sherman story, beware. In Sherman’s fiction, more often than not, you’re a Jewish teenager, an insecure, lonely wallflower. You are not the prettiest girl in school—though your best friend may be. Instead, you’re burdened with dark, hairy eyebrows, and you can’t stop picking at your face. You pine for the blond football player named Chess or Ham, though of course he’s already taken. He may humor you. You may smoke with him in the woods behind school; he may tell you his secrets. And at home, you’re saddled with a strange, Swedish au pair, a person so foreign he might as well be extraterrestrial.

Sherman’s debut novel, Living Room, is the story of a family in crisis, told from the perspectives of three generations of women. There’s Abby, the archetypal Sherman teen, who flirts with popularity to avoid troubles at home; Livia, her mother, who struggles with unfulfilled career aspirations and a strange eating disorder as her marriage unravels; and Headie, the grandmother, who is approaching senility, a new Mac Book providing her only link to the real world.

Each character inhabits a different living room: Abby and her friends smoke out on a dilapidated couch in the woods behind school; Livia redecorates the home of a wealthy lesbian couple on Lloyd Neck; and Headie confines herself to her living room carpet. These private spaces are highly valued and carefully guarded. They give the women a place to escape from their lives and a place to project their fantasies.

Often praised for her lack of sentimentality, Sherman doesn’t hesitate to capture her characters’ weird, unbecoming thoughts. She doesn’t sugarcoat adolescent experience, nor does she avert her eyes from painful or explicitly sexual scenes. Her characters push each other’s heads down while receiving blowjobs. They shout “Ha!” as they try to get inside one another. Female characters are often punished for their innocence—their initial encounters with men are rough and unromantic, never failing to leave a mark. And sex isn’t the only subject rawly depicted in Living Room: grief, cruelty, and claustrophobia are all depicted with great skill.

Rachel Sherman

Yet to many fans of Sherman’s work, Living Room may seem a bit familiar. The novel recycles themes and characters from her 2006 short story collection, The First Hurt, as if the title story had been expanded into a novel, its acne-stricken narrator, her grandmother, and her golden, lacrosse-playing crush all neatly transported.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with revisiting topics in one’s work. Recurring motifs like characters’ skin problems in “The Reaper” and “Jewish Hair” serve to unify the stories in The First Hurt. But by doing so, Sherman invites direct comparison between the stories and the novel. In a 2006 interview with Bookslut, she said, “I think that short stories come naturally to me. I guess I’m always interested in snapshots of life.” Her writing lends itself to the form: her story structures tight as fists, her prose terse and unadorned. Her best stories work because they focus teenage angst into one razor-sharp moment, the rawness of the subject matter enhanced by her stark prose.

Living Room, however, lacks the tautness and compression of those stories. This is partly an issue of proportion. Sherman’s short stories climax in small moments that hint at the characters’ interior lives: In “The First Hurt,” the narrator and her blonde crush cut class to smoke in the woods, but the moment is ruined when Ham sprains his ankle and then suggests that Sarah try a sport. This “helpful” suggestion may seem anticlimactic, but to the narrator it confirms, crushingly, that Ham doesn’t see her as a romantic prospect. Small moments like this abound in Living Room, but cannot build tension over the longer narrative. Instead, they flash and fizzle, in a series of telling sparks. Even the climax, which involves two characters’ simultaneous hospitalizations, is a little too expected, too pat, too high school.

Adolescent characterizations remain Sherman’s strong suit. Abby’s insights are fresh and revealing; her interactions with boys and with her mischievous friend Jenna are often scene-stealers. In contrast, the older characters seem lost in their quirks, their development arrested. Livia fixates on the sex life of her lesbian client, conscious of her breasts the way a teenager might be. Headie spends most of the novel crawling around on the living room floor, imaginary dancers twirling around her.

One of the novel’s most telling scenes occurs when Livia observes her daughter riding in Chess’s Jeep, smoking a cigarette and smiling. “For some reason it seems funny,” she thinks. This unexpected reaction reveals her sympathy for her daughter and the commonality Livia sees between Abby and her younger self. Otherwise, each generation seems isolated from the others, depriving readers of the insight that another character’s perspective could provide. As a result, despite moments of brilliance, Living Room remains in the shadow of Sherman’s short stories, exploring the same situations, the same configurations of loss and desire. For someone familiar with Sherman’s work, Living Room evokes a feeling of déjà vu, like entering a house with the same layout as one you’ve lived in before.

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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?

Shya Scanlon: Well, let me begin by saying that everyone who has participated so far has been really encouraging, cooperative and supportive. And that’s been a really important part of this, for me. Editors are busy people—it takes an enormous amount of time and dedication to run a journal, and most editors are writers to boot, so they’re just basically up to their lookin’ balls in reading, editing, submitting, etc. Asking them, as I have done, to kind of interrupt their basic editorial patterns to participate in the Forecast 42 Project, is a big deal, so I can’t begin to say how honored I am to receive their attention. The idea itself has received some attention from various lit-related outlets, and that’s also been great. As to how all that support and interest translates into readership, well, it’s really hard to tell. I can say that the traffic on my own blog has risen, and though it goes through peaks and valleys, many people seem to be clicking through to my site from the various chapters. They are also clicking through to the various chapters from my site, one after another—on the advisement of a friend, I had the chapters open in new windows from my site, but I’m not convinced that’s the best way to go about it, since it encourages the reader to use my site as a kind of hub, which I’m not sure I want. Anyway, what I don’t know is whether people are clicking through from site to site—following the thread, as it were. It’s a challenge, I think, in part because the web itself encourages such non-linear behavior. I hope to gather some of this info from the editors/bloggers once things are over, but I didn’t want to ask for yet another thing, and I know for a fact that some editors simply don’t look at their traffic numbers. All of which is to say that, the serialization seems to be going “well,” but it’s hard to tell exactly how well.

The Rumpus: How have the style and format of different web outlets affected the way that people have responded to each chapter?

Shya Scanlon: Again, there’s so much I can’t really tell. It’s like watching one door of a big, many-doored building, and trying to determine what the behavior inside looks like, based on how many people walk through it. I think I can say, for instance, that the “size” or, I don’t know, “stature” of a journal doesn’t equate to web traffic. But my window into that traffic might only show me reader taste, not ultimate count.

The Rumpus: What have you learned from your viral promotion of this novel? Has it been “successful?” What would you do differently in the future? What didn’t you expect?

Shya Scanlon: Mostly what I’ve learned is that promotion takes a lot of work. I think at minimum, the process requires about 5 or 6 emails per chapter—some require, for various reasons, many more. And there’s overlap, so I’m constantly having to keep track of back links and forward links and contact info and timing and whether people have the right info, etc. Part of this is the recognition that, however important something may seem to you, it’s just one of many things your contact person is having to juggle, so if you need something to happen in a certain way, at a certain time, you need to be a little annoying. (Fortunately, that comes naturally to me.) If I do this again—which isn’t out of the question—I think I’d certainly do some things differently. Basically, it’s a lot to read. Even if someone really likes the book (and I’ve heard many positive comments), it’s a long time to have to pay attention to a thing. Think of how long it normally takes you to read a book. One sitting if you have the time. A week to a month if you don’t. I’m basically saying, please read my book for the next five months. I’m not sure what the best way around this is—especially when everyone seems convinced that people won’t read more than a couple thousand words at a time online—but it’s something I’d look at. I read one person commenting in their blog that they liked the book, but that they were going to wait until more of it was online, so they wouldn’t have to stagger their reading experience. And I wonder how many people feel this way. I might, in the future, make some version of the book available on Lulu or something, for instance, so that at any point a reader could make the leap to reading it through if they wanted. Anyway, there are a lot of things to consider, but it’s been a rewarding experience in many ways, so I’d say that I’m drawn to consider them.

Finally, one of the unequivocal successes of the serialization is that the book has been bought by a very exciting, very innovative new press called Flatmancrooked, who will be releasing it in print next year. They heard about it through my call for participants, agreed to participate, and liked the book so much they decided to make it their first full-length novel.

**
Chapter 21 of Forecast will be released at Brandi Wells Review on Thursday, September 24. For the entire serialization schedule, visit Shya’s website.

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England and her longtime attorney-turned-agent Roy Hardy claim that Winkler conducted all book-related business from his home, refusing to list England as co-author, provide access to online sales and revenue accounts, or let her deal directly with promoters.

Winkler denies any wrongdoing and said he welcomes the Sept. 23 hearing. He said his relationship with England and Hardy has been difficult from the start: Hardy regularly interfered with their LA-based publicist to broker separate deals for England, and the pair carelessly withdrew money from their joint checking account. Winkler claims he formed his own Virginia-based publishing company, Bad Apple Books LLC, to handle administrative issues and protect himself.

Things “crashed and burned pretty fast” after the Library of Congress canceled England’s scheduled August appearance, Winkler said. The lecture was nixed over safety concerns after opposition from library employees produced violent threats. According to Winkler, he’s sold only 20 copies of the book through his website and perhaps a few hundred through other online retailers.

“I think there’s this impression I’ve been sitting on this cash,” Winkler said. “I wish it were true. … Nobody’s getting rich here. I’m in the hole.”

The book, titled Tortured: Lynndie England, Abu Ghraib and the Photographs That Shocked the World, details England’s youth and her twisted relationship with Corporal Charles Graner. As England’s only authorized biographer, Winkler had unprecedented access to the soldier, her family, and friends. England, now 26, said she hopes the book will help people understand that she had a limited role in the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib.

While eager to salvage her reputation, England remains unapologetic about her role in the prison scandal.

“Sorry? For what I did?” she said in an interview with the UK’s Daily Mail. “All I did was stand in the pictures. Saying sorry is admitting I was guilty and I’m not. I was just doing my duty.”

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In Gorrell’s poetry, stanzas are timestamped, technology achieves poetic compression, and loneliness is refreshing your Gmail inbox again and again with no new messages. Social networking sites like Myspace and Facebook don’t alleviate Gorrell’s anxiety. Rather, they provide new reasons for him to feel lonely, misanthropic, and depressed. For example, in “brandon,” a poem about insomnia, he writes:

brandon feels anxious
brandon feels embarrassed that he can’t sleep
brandon signs into gmail chat
brandon quickly signs out of gmail chat
brandon checks myspace
there are no new comments or messages or friend requests
there is a new event invitation
brandon looks at his bulletin board
brandon feels angry at the people that post at least one bulletin a day
brandon has been considering taking the people that post one bulletin a day off his friend list for about a month now
brandon thinks this is logical because in real life he only feels comfortable around quiet people and not people that feel the need to scream their names at 200 online contacts multiple times a day
brandon checks facebook
someone has body slammed brandon on facebook
brandon feels depressed

4:12 AM
brandon has checked all his websites
brandon thinks ‘it’s 4:12 AM and my day is already over’
brandon looks at his bookmarks
brandon feels anxiety
brandon feels guilt for feeling uninterested in other people’s blogs
brandon goes to gmail

Many of Gorrell’s poems, like “brandon,” adapt online form and syntax. They are written in lowercase, 10 pt Arial, the same font as his blog. In fact, “brandon” reads like a stream of status messages, as if the narrator logged his late-night Internet surfing by compulsively updating his Twitter.

The poem records the minute, forward momentum of digital life, the constant buzz of updates and notifications we’ve grown accustomed to. But rather than merely mimic the formal conventions of Twitter or Facebook, Gorrell explores the effect of these new technologies on our psyches. In “gmail,” he writes:

i have urges to not check my email for a week so that when i finally check it i can feel at least a minute or a minute and a half of extreme excitement

i have gotten adrenaline rushes from situations like finding eight new emails

Who hasn’t felt a thump of excitement upon receiving a batch of new emails? Gorrell examines the quirks of our new technology, the small, telling signs of our attachment.

Brandon Scott Gorrell

Anxiety, alienation, and low self-confidence are Gorrell’s buzz words, key notes of the collection. Not only do these words appear in nearly every poem, but they are prominently featured in neon green starbursts on the back cover. The poems are self-aware, sarcastic, proud of their aesthetic. Sometimes, as in “some inconceivable crisis thing” their manic meta-analysis verges on play. Gorrell writes, “is it legitimate to feel asinine about feeling asinine // has anyone else ever felt incredibly sarcastic about feeling incredibly depressed but at the same time felt incredibly depressed // is that something anyone has done”.

Web culture encourages this emotional exhibitionism. Facebook asks, “What’s on your mind?” prompting us to view our thoughts and our actions in the third person, to externalize. The detached, clinical tone of the lines in “brandon” allow the narrator to stand outside himself as he broadcasts his embarrassment, depression, and guilt in short, deadpan chunks.

This detachment operates on a grander scale in Gorrell’s more violent poems, like “a calm, melodramatic, silent apocalypse”. In this poem, Gorrell literally wishes to float above himself like an alien or mad scientist, enjoying a bird’s-eye view of his destruction, squashing humans like ants.

i want to do this from two places

as myself, a giant flesh thing

experiencing my intense, silent destruction

the people i am rolling towards

looking into my eyes nervously

saying ‘it’s okay’

then laying down

the structures in the cities yielding softly to the pressure

the dust i create rolling through streets lined with towers

the sound of my movement generating a gentle, barely audible hum

and from just above the atmosphere

in a dark spacecraft

my face lit by the neon glow of control panels

hovering silently over the west coast

watching myself from a distance

destroying metropolises

killing people i can’t see

thinking about large-scale, thoughtless annihilation

At first glance, the subject matter of “a calm, melodramatic, silent apocalypse” seems very different from that of “brandon” or “gmail.” But the doubleness in this poem, the splitting of selves into actor and observer, virtual persona and person behind the persona, mirrors the splitting that occurs in online interactions. It’s the disconnect between these selves that creates space for loneliness and misunderstanding. In an interview with Chris Killen, Gorrell said, “sometimes i feel like it would be nice if a massive tidal wave crushed everything or something like that, only because i feel alone and there are so many people. … it’s just a scenario i imagine a lot, i think. to relieve pressure.”

Gorrell’s poetic landscapes are vast and intangible. His poems explore outer space, Internet, the mind. Solitary landscapes, sure, but fertile ground for an imaginative new voice.

Brandon Scott Gorell, MuuMuu House Book Release at P.P.O.W Gallery, July 3, 2009 from P.P.O.W Gallery on Vimeo.

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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.

Guards wore khaki uniforms and one-way aviator sunglasses. Armed with whistles and billy clubs, they worked 8-hour shifts with ambiguous orders to keep their prisoners in line.

Upon arrival, prisoners were stripped naked and deloused. They wore uniform smocks and stocking caps. Guards referred to them by number instead of name, woke them up in the middle of the night with their whistles, blindfolded and chained them together for toilet runs. As punishment, the prisoners were forced to do push-ups or placed in “The Hole” for solitary confinement. They remained in the prison round the clock.

Within a few days, the guards became sadistic, creative tormentors; the prisoners became withdrawn and zombielike, showing signs of extreme stress. The power of the situation even affected Zimbardo, who assumed the role of prison superintendent.

Zimbardo: One day Christina Maslach came down and saw the guards line up the prisoners for the toilet run at ten o’clock. The guards chain their legs together, they have their bags over their heads, their arms on each other, the guards are cursing, yelling at them, the prisoners are shuffling along. I look up and I have the day’s agenda—and I check off “ten o’clock toilet run.” That’s all it is. She looks at it and says, “This is horrendous! This is dehumanization. This is a violation of everything that humanity stands for. And this is you allowing this to happen, essentially.” So that’s a really critical thing. I’m not being cruel, I’m just being totally indifferent to suffering. And indifferent to suffering, because what’s happening is what usually happens at ten o’clock. If it didn’t happen, then I would be concerned: “Where’s the ten o’clock toilet run?” Now the toilet run didn’t have to be with chains, it didn’t have to be with bags, it didn’t have to be with all this other stuff. But that got to be the routine. So we’re following a routine, it’s nothing more than a checking it off, for me. For her, it’s nothing more than a violation of humanity.

The two-week experiment was cut short after only six days because of how the situation affected the college students who participated.

So when Zimbardo heard about the Abu Ghraib abuses and saw the notorious photographs, he was not surprised. The sexual humiliation, the naked prisoners with bags over their heads–he had seen it all before in his own simulated prison.

Zimbardo: [Cheney and Bush and Rumsfeld] created the situation. They created a system in which each of these parts fell out, so I’m saying they are responsible.

Here is some footage from the Stanford Prison Experiment and a follow-up interview with a former prisoner and guard:

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Here is the complete list of layoffs:

Jeanne Carstensen, managing editor
Kevin Berger, features editor
Katharine Mieszkowski, senior writer
Joy Press, culture editor
Caitlin Shamberg, multimedia editor
Julie Coburn, photo editor

“The Company’s operating forecast for the remainder of the fiscal year ending March 31, 2010 anticipates continued operating losses,” says the statement accompanying Salon’s SEC filing. “Salon estimates it will require between $1.75 and $2.5 million in additional funding to meet its operating needs for the balance of its fiscal year.”

David Weir at BNET said, “You can see from the numbers culled from the SEC filing that new CEO Richard Gingras really had no option but to further cut costs, and at Salon, that primarily means the human costs of producing content.

Zeke Turner at Mediaite commented,

A look at the positions cut suggests that the emphasis will be on “sharp” and “fast” rather than “meticulously-edited”: According to Gingras, they let go 3 editors, 1 writer, a photo editor and a multimedia producer. Three editors – that loses a layer of work on a story, not the story itself. It is more complicated than that, obviously, but it seems clear that everyone at Salon will have to get leaner, better and faster with these changes.

Called the “cockroach of the web,” Salon has managed to survive all sorts of trials and tribulations since its 1995 launch, including leadership changes, declining revenues, and stagnating traffic. Yet it continues to publish valuable, relevant content, such as the previously unseen Abu Ghraib photos.

Weir said, “The current challenge for Salon is how to reinvent itself as a viable business and then re-grow its journalism around that new model. It’s the same challenge facing every media company that’s been around since the last century.”

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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.

The move, which CEO Jeff Bezos called “stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles,” revealed the retailer’s far-reaching control over its electronic content and highlighted how few rights e-book purchasers actually have.

As Jack Balkin writes:

For centuries, we have understood, or rather believed, that owning books came with certain rights, including the right to keep what we purchase and to use it, mark it up, and sell it in any way we like. We were free to purchase books and keep them in our homes, without telling anybody what we were reading, or indeed, what page we had last looked at. Amazon’s Kindle upends all of these expectations.

Today, InformationWeek reports that Justin D. Gawronski and Antoine J. Bruguier, two interviewees featured in the July 18 New York Times article about the issue, have filed a lawsuit against Amazon and are seeking class-action status.

Gawronski, a 17-year-old from Detroit, purchased MobileReference’s copy of 1984 for a summer reading assignment. When the file was deleted, his notes and annotations “were rendered useless because they no longer referenced the relevant parts of the book.”

The plaintiffs seek restitution for “all damages caused by [Amazon's] conduct,” as well as litigation expenses and attorney fees. They also ask the court to rule that Amazon does not have the right to remotely delete digital content from Kindles and such action is a violation of Amazon’s terms of use for the device.

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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.”

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