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Valentine's Day is all about love, romance, sex, and funding the American greeting card, flower, chocolate, and restaurant industries. What better way to celebrate all that than with a dirty story about James Franco's sex life? More »
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If you think Apple is a vertical corporate monolith, wait until you get a load of Amazon's reported plans: The e-tailer turned tablet maker turned publisher is said to be planning a physical store in Seattle with an eye toward building a national chain. And you thought the literati hated Amazon before. More »
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Today in inspired feats of profound boredom: eBay user The_Heppcat claims he typed the entirety of Moby Dick on four rolls of single-ply toilet paper to win a bet. (Or for the most labor-intensive "Dick up your butt" punchline in human history.) More »
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Game of Thrones is the best show on television and I would happily murder three people of your choosing if you were able to get me a screener of the second season. George R.R. Martin, author of the A Song of Ice and Fire series that the HBO show is based on, is a wizard who created an entire alternate universe from his own imagination. More »
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Denis D. Gray at the AP has a rundown on a new book out about the fascinating exploits of alleged spy Jim Thompson in Southeast Asia. A well known titan of the silk industry, Thompson disappeared in 1967 after going for a walk in the Malaysian highlands. Rumors abound about his death, including that he was eaten by a tiger or killed by the CIA. If those are the rumors surrounding your death, there's a good chance your life was pretty eventful. More »
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Carlos Castaneda. Timothy Leary. Daniel Pinchbeck…mopey Ted Mosby? Josh Radnor, he of How I Met Your Mother and that movie no one saw that kind of looked like Garden State, looks to join the literary titans of tripping with a memoir slated for an April release. One Big Blissful Thing details his journey from a suburban Ohio upbringing to ayahuasca ceremonies in the Amazon. Ayahuasca is a hallucinogenic plant that many Amazon tribes use for ritualistic practices. Maybe all that drug use is why he keeps rambling on and digressing with how he actually met his wife? More »
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Have you had the opportunity to settle down with the hot new political gossip book of the past several days, New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor's The Obamas? The Gawker Political Desk rarely consumes these White House reporters' bound anecdote collections but, for mysterious reasons, both obtained and made it through 200 pages of Kantor's offering before having to stop due to a total lack of interest in continuing. More »
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If history is any guide, tech companies should absolutely not try and become media companies. But the 25-year-old CEO of precious New York blog platform Tumblr has the fearlessness of youth. Which is why he's recruiting his own writer and editor types. More »
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Notorious class sleeper, D student, failed Oscar host, art enthusiast, multiple PhD candidate, and sometimes actor James Franco is going to ruin literature once again. He sold a novel! To Amazon! About actors! My eyes are getting a workout from all this rolling. More »
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If you're like us, you spent a lot of time this year reading words. But which words were the best words? (Not "amazeballs," for sure.) Here, each Gawker staffer recommends the best things he or she read this year—books, articles, blogs, comics and more. More »
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Peter Braunstein was a former writer for The Village Voice, WWD and other New York publications who became a tabloid sensation in 2005 after he went crazy, raped a woman [Correction: Braunstein was convicted of kidnapping, sexual abuse, robbery and burglary. He was never charged with rape], and went on the run. Aaron Gell (now an editor at the New York Observer), a former colleague of Braunstein's, has revisited the man and tried to make sense of his crimes in his new Kindle Single, Speak of the Devil: How Peter Braunstein went from Fashion Casualty to Tabloid Monster. More »
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Glen Maxey, the first openly gay member of the Texas State Legislature and longtime Democratic activist, spent most of last summer helping a reporter for a "national news outlet" nail down persistent rumors of Rick Perry's sexual relationships with men. The story got killed. So Maxey has published an e-book laying out the evidence. Among the charges: Rick Perry has a small dick. More »
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Fat dick and Fox News chief Roger Ailes is shopping a memoir, New York's Gabriel Sherman reports. It looks like the man who devoted his life to building a multibillion-dollar platform from which to attack his political and personal enemies wants to sum it all up in a book attacking his political and personal enemies. More »
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Walter Isaacson's authorized Steve Jobs biography just became Amazon's bestselling book of 2011. Which is pretty ironic, given that it's about a tech CEO who four years ago said "the fact is that people don't read anymore." More »
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Borders, America's second biggest book store chain, died this summer, its red-trimmed outlets sinking inexorably into a savage sea of red ink. (Beat that lede, Wall Street Journal!) For Barnes & Noble, the most popular book chain, this could be interpreted as good news: its biggest competitor was gone. Or, bad news: book stores are a dying industry. More »
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Yesterday we introduced you to Mark Kelley, the literary agent with a particularly forceful, unsolicited brand of flair. Did Mark Kelley send a lengthy follow-up email last night, CC-ed to a bunch of investigative reporters, for some reason? Of course he did. Should we share this with you? Eh, why not. More »
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Earlier today, our office receptionist got a call from a secretive man demanding my phone number, though he wouldn't say why. (She thought he sounded angry, though perhaps he was just excited.) He settled for my email address, and sent the following message: More »
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Badly! Presidential candidate and congresswoman Michele Bachmann's new memoir Core of Conviction is out, and Mother Jones' Tim Murphy has read it, for some reason. Here are some of the wrong things Bachmann wrote in her book, about herself. More »
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Yesterday, news broke of a massive ($500K, allegedly) book deal for 24 year-old Ryan Holiday (pictured)—whose name will be familiar to savvy Gawker readers as the spokesman for American Apparel. So what's so interesting about him? More »
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What do you say to a harsh criticism from astronaut-hero Mark Kelly, husband of wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords? You can't call him a jerk or anything. He's astronaut-hero Mark Kelly, husband of wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords! You just have to take it. Hear that, John Boehner? You will just have to take it. More »
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Incompetent superflack Ronn [sic] Torossian is primarily known for harassing employees and harassing journalists and giving poor advice and suing everyone over everything and representing odious clients and generally running a PR firm which is hilariously incompetent and unethical. Who better to teach you about PR? More »
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How many more indignities must Bill O'Reilly suffer as he tries to peddle his published wares to the discerning public? First the acclaimed television host and author had to witness U.S. soldiers burning his Pinheads and Patriots and boasting about it, and now Ford's Theatre is banning his new Abe Lincoln book for being wrong about everything. More »
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Plot for forthcoming young adult novel The Future of Us: Two teenagers go online in 1996, and discover a wormhole to their future Facebook profiles, thereby allowing them to meet their future selves and learn life lessons. More »
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Saturday Night Live alum Darrell Hammond has been talking a lot about the crazy amount of drugs he did during his comedy career. In an excerpt from his new book God, If You're Not There, I'm F*cked, he talks about how rehab can be even worse than addiction. More »
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Barrett Brown, the "Face" of Anonymous, has had a busy week, promoting the hacktivist collective's extremely-confusing war against the notorious Zetas drug cartel in every outlet from CNN to Gawker. But a six-figure book deal probably helps with the fatigue. More »
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According to a copy of her forthcoming book, obtained by the Associated Press, Gabrielle Giffords intends to take up her seat again in the House of Representatives: "I will get stronger. I will return." More »
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Disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff knows a thing or two about political corruption and lobbying. And in his new book "Capitol Punishment: The Hard Truth About Washington Corruption From America's Most Notorious Lobbyist," he has a few ideas on how to fix the system: More »
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So many people think that the more Facebook friends they have, the better. Wrong! In an excerpt from his just released book You Are Not So Smart David McRaney explains "Dunbar's Number" and why trying to keep in touch with more than 150 people, even on Facebook, is a biological impossibility. More »
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The thing about the big Steve Jobs book is that its cover is very.... intense. Steve, he watches you. You want to flip it over, constantly. Or make a blog like Watched By Steve, about the hardcover's discomfiting ubiquity. [via] More »
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The birther website World Net Daily might have gotten the publishing rights to Jack Abramoff's forthcoming memoir, but Tucker Carlson's Daily Caller gets to host the book party. More »
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Nixonian cretin Patrick Buchanan is such a jolly old coot on MSNBC—he's even got an adorable Odd Couple routine with lesbian leftie Rachel Maddow—that it's easy to forget that he's a White Power proponent who thinks it's "natural and normal" to prefer members of your own race to black folks. Luckily, he writes virulently racist books now and again to remind us. More »
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Are you poor and homeless and starving and sick of trying to fix things through the usual channels, which are all broken? Fear not! There may be a secret remedy that you haven't considered: President Obama's personal checkbook. Because he'll occasionally send personal checks to struggling people who write him with their horror stories. Just make sure to include all the gritty details. More »
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Under the guise of a program called "Books for the Troops," Bill O'Reilly strong-arms viewers into buying his latest bestseller by promising to send a copy of each one sold to American soldiers serving overseas. Of course, that doesn't mean the troops actually want the books, as we learned Wednesday when one serviceman in Afghanistan posted a photo online of scores of O'Reilly's Pinheads & Patriots burning in a trash bin. How rude! Thankfully, Stephen Colbert was at attention on tonight's Report to set the pinheaded troops straight. More »
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Coffee marketers and morning-show hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski are writing a memoir. Together. Because the fact that you see them on the TV together means that you want to read about them both at the same time! If you'd like to read about them separately, pick up Brzezinski's 2009 already written memoir All Things at Once and Scarborough's 2004 "part memoir, part political treatise" Rome Wasn't Burnt in a Day. Maybe this new one will have awesome sex scenes, or something. More »
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What did the soldiers in Afghanistan do with those copies of Pinheads and Patriots your dad sent in a care package? They set them on fire. More »
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There's a whole insane world of Lego enthusiasts out there. There's even a theme park devoted to all things Lego that opened in Florida a couple of weeks ago. More »
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When young-adult novel Lauren Myracle found out that her gay teen hate crime novel Shine had been shortlisted for a National Book Award, she was "over the moon." More »
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Let's say you're a woman who's worked hard, climbed the ladder, and risen to the very pinnacle of your profession—a historic achievement. You're taken seriously as a writer, a thinker, and a boss; you alone have the power to set the agenda for how many of our most important issues are covered by the national and international media. You have made it. Why—hypothetically speaking—would you not shut up about your stupid dog? More »
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We've all heard members of the religious right rambling their silly, anti-gay slogan, "God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve." Well, on this National Coming Out Day, God is coming clean and admitting they're wrong: He did, in fact, create Adam and Steve. More »
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Steve Jobs's black turtlenecks helped make him the world's most recognizable CEO. But the Apple co-founder wouldn't have worn them if his employees had accepted the nylon jacket he proposed as a corporate uniform instead. Before he died, Jobs himself explained his sartorial signature to biographer Walter Isaacson, in an interview published for the first time below. More »
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