Not to be too reductive, but Douglas Rogers is from Zimbabwe and he's white. His parents are the owners of a backpacker lodge popular with tourists and found themselves swept up in Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's plans to reclaim white-owned land. He returned and saw the chaos that ensued. As his synopsis puts it:

On returning to the country of his birth, Douglas finds his once orderly and progressive home transformed into something resembling a Marx Brothers romp crossed with Heart of Darkness: Pot has supplanted maize in the fields; hookers have replaced college kids as guests; and soldiers, spies, and teenage diamond dealers guzzle beer at the bar. Beyond the farm gates, meanwhile, rogue politicians, witch doctors, and armed war veterans loyal to President Mugabe circle like hungry lions.

Douglas currently lives in Brooklyn and writes regularly for Travel & Leisure, the Daily Telegraph and the Guardian, and once attempted to explain cricket to me over beers. Damian, who also lives in Brooklyn, has the novels Stretch 29 and The Chancers and the BBC comedy series Massive.

from The Last Resort...

And we ate like kings. There was more than marijuana growing in those former flower beds. I discovered now why my parents looked so healthy. There was a famine looming in Zimbabwe in early 2005, but if you could eat avocados you'd never go hungry in this neck of the woods. Every few days, scores of young black traders would make their way down from the orchards in the surrounding mountain valleys with huge burlap sacks filled with bananas, oranges, lemons, pawpaws, mangos, and avocados.

Mostly avocados: smooth green oval- shaped gems the size of baseballs. The traders would wait at the bottom of Christmas Pass for transport to Harare, 180 miles to the west, where they hoped to sell the fruit at market, but there was no fuel, and the buses weren't running. Instead, they'd just sit for days, sleeping by the roadside, while their crop rotted away in the sun. My father was outraged with this state of affairs. These were innovative, hardworking young entrepreneurs, trying to make a living. People were starving in Zimbabwe, yet here mountains of food rotted away. The state couldn't even get buses to work. My parents had already begun growing most of their own vegetables, but now they started buying what they didn't grow from these informal traders, and it helped account for their excellent health. They ate fruit salads every morning, drank fresh- squeezed lemonade during the day instead of Coke or cordials, and cooked elaborate meals at night from recipes they got watching the Naked Chef, Nigella Lawson, and Anthony Bourdain on their new satellite TV.

I told them I never ate half so well back in Brooklyn, and we decided one night they needed a Food Network show of their own, with a cookbook tie- in. We came up with a title. It would be called Recipes for Disaster: Adventures in the Kitchen of a Failed State. In it they would be filmed buying produce from those informal traders on the road, asking them about their lives, how they got those heavy bags down the mountain. Did they own the orchards or steal the fruit? My parents would also have to be filmed buying food from the new farmers in the valley who were trying to make a go of it. "Oh, Christ," said Mom. "Will I have to jump up and down chanting ZANU- PF slogans in exchange for a maize cob?"
My father loved the idea.

"Yes, Rosalind, I can see you doing that. And just think of the appeal to a Western audience: ethnic dancing and an organic maize cob. These buggers have no fertilizer."

Another episode, we decided, would be dedicated to the miracle of Zimbabwean cheese. My father had discovered that due to a shortage of one vital ingredient (or perhaps the loss of skilled staff), the usually tasteless Gouda that the state Dairy Marketing Board manufactured had now turned into a delectably rich and creamy Brie- as tasty as anything you might find in Provence. He bought several wheels of it at a time at the DMB ware house in Mutare, worried that they might discover and correct their mistake and it would go back to tasting awful. Finally, we decided that each episode would show them cooking up some masterpiece on that gas stove by candlelight on the kitchen floor during a power outage.

"We need more atmosphere," I told them. "A sense of place."

"I know," said my mother, warming to the theme. "We could fire up the generator and eat each meal in front of the TV, watching a speech by Mugabe ranting about us ‘white imperialist running dogs of capitalism,' or the ‘homosexual government of Tony Blair.'"

We burst out laughing.

"You know what?" Dad guffawed. "It could work. I reckon that Anthony Bourdain chap would come out here and present it. He goes to some really wacky places." My mom's eyes lit up at the thought of the dashing Kitchen Confidential star coming out to visit them.

You can find more information on The Last Resort, on Douglas' site, including where to buy it. If you're an author or a book publicist and you want to participate in the Gawker Book Club, send me an email.

Stephen, author of the novel Happy Baby, describes his seventh book this way: "The book is about a murder story I was following, that led me to another murder trial, and also about my father's murder confession. That's a lot of murder. But ultimately, all the confessions were false, so in some ways it's really a book about truth and identity and how the lie mixes with the truth like red and yellow paint and it becomes orange, and you can never change it back to red or yellow. At one point this was a true crime book, but it became a memoir, and if I boiled it down to one thing I would say it's a book about writing and being a writer."

To promote it, he launched a program on The Rumpus, the web site he edits, to give away copies to readers with the condition that after a week of reading it, they sign it and pass it along to another reader. Currently, on book tour, he's taken to interviewing some of the people he's been meeting. They're worth a read.

Here's an excerpt from the book:

The morning after the fight I get a call from Josh, a staff writer at Wired Magazine. He's working on a profile of Hans Reiser, a brilliant computer programmer accused of killing his estranged wife.

I helped Josh track down Hans' former best friend, Sean. Sean and I have several girlfriends in common and I once did a bondage photo shoot in his apartment when he wasn't home. I don't remember ever meeting him but our paths have crossed so many times it almost doesn't make sense. Josh is calling to say he found out something incredible about the case. "Your guy Sean just confessed to eight murders, maybe nine."

"Why maybe nine?"

"He isn't sure if one of the victims was dead."

Josh says Sean's not under arrest and he's refusing to tell the District Attorney the names of the people he killed. Sean told Josh that he confessed to the DA because he's a born again Christian and thought the jury would want to know, it seemed the right thing to do. Or rather, he posed it as a question, "Don't you think the jury would want to know?" But then he said Hans knew about his murders and he was confessing in order to beat Hans to the punch. Maybe he confessed for both reasons. Or maybe he confessed for reasons that had nothing to do with Reiser or the jury. He denied having anything to do with Hans' wife's disappearance. He told Josh, "Give me some sodium pentothal or any truth serum, put a little ecstasy in there and ask me if I killed Nina. I have never been a threat to her."*

Sean told the police and the district attorney that his victims had physically and sexually abused him and his sister in the East Bay commune where they were raised. He claimed he hadn't killed anyone since 1996. The commune interests me. I know the places where adults come in contact with unsupervised children. Between fourteen and eighteen I was in five different state funded childcare facilities, including three group homes, a mental hospital, and a temporary youth shelter that stuffed thirty children in each room. In those places you can never tell who to trust.

When I'm done talking to Josh I feel like I'm waiting for something. The group homes were a long time ago. It's still morning and I put a pot of water on the stove. I call Josh back and ask him for Sean's phone number.

If Sean committed eight murders it's a huge story, I think. Here is a man willing to wait years to get revenge on the people that stole his childhood. I think of In Cold Blood and The Executioners Song, two of my favorite books, both set around spectacular murders and written by novelists. I know people who have known Sean for more than a decade. I have the inside track. And there's something else about the case; Nina Reiser's body was never found.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I don't know if Sean will talk to me. If he did kill eight people, surely the police would have arrested him by now. And why isn't he a suspect in the disappearance of Nina Reiser?

After calling Sean and leaving a message I bicycle through the city, down Market Street toward the Castro, my right pant leg rolled up so as not to get caught in the chain. My bicycle is my prize possession, an old Peugot I picked up for $150 nine years ago. I live a spare existence. I haven't owned a car since I first got to this city.

I cut right, past the Gay and Lesbian Center and the Three Dollar Bill Café. Something's tugging on me. I had heard of Nina's murder, but never the full story. I had heard about Sean and how Nina's disappearance crushed him. He took to bed, paralyzed with grief. He was in love with his best friend's wife. It was all just passing information. But eight murders? Revenge killings? Eight murders isn't revenge. Eight murders is a serial killer.

I go to the park to meet a girl I know. Someone who has taken a habit of coming to my readings. She's engaged and lives with her fiancé between the Marina and Russian Hill. I've only seen her once before and she'd explained their relationship. It was simple. He was monogamous and believed in monogamy. She cheated on him and always would.

She arrives wearing a black dress and sandals. Her skin is so pale all I can think of is milk. I don't think of my complicity in her unfaithfulness. I don't want to. I don't love her; she's just someone I know. I wait as she walks across the grass in her sandals. A man stops her and asks if she is willing to be in one of his paintings. She talks with him for a moment, her head turned his way, her body pointing toward me. He doesn't have any paint. He wears dark, heavy clothes, his belongings bound in garbage bags around him.

The sun is brilliant and the colorful houses are brightly lit along the hills. On some days the fog catches on their drainpipes like cotton, but today it's easy to see why people want to live here. Easy to see San Francisco for the gentle paradise it is.

We lie on the grass with my shirt pulled up. I forget all about De La Hoya's fight and Sean Sturgeon' confession. I ask her to pinch my nipple and she does but it isn't enough. I ask her to do it harder and soon there is blood everywhere. There are people nearby but they don't seem to notice. For most of it she keeps her hand over my mouth and I close my eyes and drift away. "It's OK," she says.

That's only half the day. There's a barbecue, and then a reading, and then a party. There's always a party. I dance with a girl. "How do you know Eric?" I ask between songs. "I don't," she says. "My boyfriend knows him." I dance better after that. It's still the weekend, after all. It's still San Francisco. Everything is beautiful. Really. It seems perfect. The DJ looks like Napoleon Dynamite and spins pop from the 80s on vinyl. I'm thirty-five years old. The woman I'm dancing with has curly black hair and moves with steady grace, her silk dress rolling in waves down her arms. I feel loose and fine. I take five dollars from another writer, who put his money, inexplicably, on De LaHoya.

"Always bet on youth," I tell him.

It's one in the morning. I don't imagine anything could ever go wrong.

You can find more information on The Adderall Diaries, including how to buy a copy, on Stephen's site.

If you're an author or a book publicist and you want to participate in the Gawker Book Club, send me an email.

It's not surprising that the mag would get a first look, because Lauren pretended to work there for a time while she filmed her show, so they have a good working relationship and whatnot. You promote me, I'll promote you, and so on and so on until they are both borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance.

From the first glimpse, the book is basically about Lauren's life. Well, I mean, the girl's name is Jane and she wants to be an event planner rather than a fashionista, but it's all basically the same. Same dumb boy names (Brody and Doug in real life, Caleb and Braden in Jane life), and same creeping worries about whether or not anything is real, or just for the cameras. That little twinge of worry is actually vaguely interesting; did LC keep herself up fretful at night, wondering if she got this or that promotion because of the television show? Did she doubt her own merit? I would say yes, because look it's all there in the book!, but um, I'm also pretty sure that Lauren didn't actually write the damn thing. Oh, which is called L.A. Candy. Which is the name of the fictional reality show in the fictional book about a real girl on a fictional reality show. Blergh!

Now let's play guess the fake passage:

1)

Jane felt her blood freeze. Fiona never called Jane into her office unless she was in trouble. It was always something like, "Jane, the last time I checked, ivory and eggshell weren't the same color," or "Jane, is this message from Jeffrey with a J or Geoffrey with a G?" What had she done this time? Either way, she preferred that her humiliating lectures take place in private-just her and Fiona behind closed doors. Guess not today. She frowned at the cameras, which were supposed to be capturing "an average workday." Well, now, the L.A. Candy viewers are going to see my average butt getting yelled at, Jane thought.

2)

"During those three months, you will work harder than you have ever worked before. At the same time, you will have opportunities that you have never had before. And if you succeed, your future as an event planner in this town will be virtually guaranteed."

Fiona leaned back in her seat and stared at Jane, waiting for her answer. Suddenly, Jane noticed that Fiona was wearing makeup. When had the boss lady started wearing makeup?

3)

Sitting at her new desk, feet twitching nervously in navy Tory Burch flats, Jane suddenly felt sick to her stomach. Was it nerves over the new promotion? Or was it something else? Why was Fiona always so nice to her when the L.A. Candy cameras were around, but then so cold and nasty when they were gone? She dialed her friend Melora's number at the record company and prayed that she would answer. Jane needed some advice quick, or else she worried she'd get sick all over her new, cream-colored office on her very first day.

4)

Paolo smiled at her. He had the cutest smile. "Hey, this may be a little forward, but ... could I call you sometime? Maybe we could go out for coffee or something? I just moved here from San Francisco, and I don't know too many people in town."

Jane was taken aback by his boldness. They had met all of 60 seconds ago. Still, he did kinda look like a young Brad Pitt. Besides, when was the last time she'd been on a date? Braden didn't count. She had met him for drinks again at Cabo Cantina over the weekend, to celebrate her being on the show and moving in to a new apartment. It had been his idea. But that wasn't a date. It never was with him. "Sure," she said.

As J.M. Barrie once said, "the printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times. Sometimes one forgets which it is."

Indeed.

The book, out next month, is by Mark Ebner and he delves into the lives of many sordid types—sloshy actress Tara Reid, solo porn star and MTV VJ Simon Rex (with whom Hilton also made a sex tape), various Playboy Playmates, and of course Girls Gone Wild impresario Joe Francis. And they all seem, in one way or another, to orbit around the great Dark Planet created by one Paris Hilton.

Hilton is infamous for the One Night in Paris sex tape that was released "without her consent" by the gentleman in the video, sleazy sideliner Rick Solomon. Rumors later circulated that Ms. Hilton was complicit in the leaking of the tape, so long as she saw some of the profits. The whole book basically paints Hilton as a duped-into-doing-it-on-camera victim for hire.

Riley, who is in prison for robbing, sexually assaulting, and blackmailing Joe Francis, says that, for sure, Hilton was in on the whole first sex tape charade. And, he alleges, it wasn't the last time the Simple Life reality stain filmed herself in flagrante delicto. Riley supposedly got a hold of several ssseeecret tapes of the nightclub fly. By, you know, stealing them from some "Russian kids" who had stolen them from her house. One tape in particular showed a litany of bad behavior: drugs, racism, taxicab fingerbangs. Riley gives Ebner some details about the tape:

Paris, of course, has said she has no idea who Riley is.

It's about a girl named Madeleine "Maddy" Stephens, a self-described East Coast "blue blood" with a father in the Foreign Service and a painter/heiress mother. She lives in a WASPy house and has a handsome, popular, but vaguely troubled older brother named Gallagher (I surely must have just missed the watermelon smashing chapter, it's gotta be in there somewhere). They call him Gal—like he's an old farm dog who dies while saving children. Well, that's Past Maddy. Present Madeleine is—surprise!—a fashion writer living the glitzy life in Manhattan, with a friend named Issy. Anyway, the stories converge when a dark figure named JP emerges out of the shadows and makes her remember her old life. You see, she spent some of her high school years as a trotting expat in Paris. JP's making a documentary about all those crazy days. Because they're all so fascinating. But it's maybe exploitative? Problems ensue. At the end she writes a memoir called The Curation of Madeleine Stephens. Because everyone's a museum and an art gallery and is special. If they're rich.

The New York Post's Page Six tells us that the book has a publisher and Hollywood is already interested. Of course.

Now, we don't know for sure that this was even written by Ms. LaCava. There was no author on the manuscript. But we can tell, using our amazing computer savvy, that the document was created on a copy of Microsoft Office registered to Advance Magazine Group. Which could mean Condé Nast. Which could mean Vogue. So.

Here are some selections:

Top image via Getty

"As much as Ashley was growing on me, I tried to keep an eye out for girls who were stealing clients from the agency... But this girl knew how to play the game. She knew the better she was to the agency, the more money she would make. I knew part of the reason she was hanging out with me so much was exactly for that reason, and I was okay with that. I think we would have been friends anyway...

Ashley and I were amazing together. I loved her body. She wasn't skinny at all, you'd never feel like you could break her, but she didn't have any fat on her body. She wasn't noticeably muscular either—she had a naturally gorgeous frame and shape. The only thing I didn't love were her breasts. She had implants, and I didn't think they were the greatest. She told me she got them when she was sixteen. That shocked me. I felt like such a foreigner. What's more American than fake tits at sixteen?

When I saw Ashley's pussy, I was overcome with the need to lick it, to devour it. And when I did, I didn't want to stop—she tasted so sweet. Ashley was at that point when girl meets woman, and it's spectacular. I had to stop before I wanted to. I couldn't be selfish as there was a client in the room.

...When Ashley and I arrived back at the loft, I took Jason aside immediately. I said, 'You've got to book this girl. She has the most beautiful coochie I've ever seen.'

Jason wanted details. I struggled to find the words. Pink, small, pretty? How do you describe the perfect flower or sunset?"

Publishers Weekly says, "After relocating to New York from Nashville, Lily becomes a society darling and marries the handsome, charming, well-educated and wealthy Robert Bartholomew. But an unplanned pregnancy destroys their nuptial bliss, and Lily becomes flabby and cellulite-laden as soon as she's carrying..."
Blah, blah, blah. What about the brand names? Ah, here we are: Jimmy Choo, Christian Louboutin, and Birkin:


And Bergdorf Goodman completes the circle of consumption. Let us pray.

The new book is little and cute and we want!

It may not be necessary for the Internet savvy among us (like everyone reading), but it makes a cute gift for someone like your grandma who doesn't understand the Internet but probably would understand funny captioned cat-photos. In the proposal, the authors assured they wouldn't be "just slapping some lolcats on a page and calling it a book." But that's exactly what they ended up doing! It doesn't matter, though. Because today we LOL'd, and we really needed to. And that is the power of the LOLcats.

Update: On the book's Amazon.com page, we noticed something very weird:

"He leads me into a pan-Asian restaurant called Buddakan, which is exactly how I imagine hell would look if the devil went into catering. It is a grotesquely large restaurant of bare brick walls, and over inflated chandeliers, made up of interlocking echoey chambers reached by huge staircases, and I can’t help but think that somewhere is a final staircase which leads to a fiery pit, full of horne’d beasts, serving only ‘Belarus Home Cooking’.

We shuffle through the crowd. ‘A girl could get pregnant on the way to the bar here,’ Zagat barks into my ear, above the noise. Young people wolf down plates of chilli rock shrimp and spiced tuna tartar as though their lives depend upon it and my ears consider haemorrhaging in time to the music.

Suddenly Zagat spots some friends at a corner table. He introduces me to ‘everyone’s favourite old time cop,’ a late middle aged man, with stubble over his fat-pleated chin. Bo Dietl, a former New York policeman, is reputed to have arrested more felons during his career than any other, and is now a private investigator. His suit, with its stars and stripes lapel pin, shines under the light, and his receding hair is slicked back. With him is a media-friendly Harvard law professor who shares his name with the playwright Arthur Miller, and a silver-haired class action lawyer called Mel Weiss who is under investigation by the Federal government for allegedly paying plaintiffs to bring law suits.

They shout questions about restaurants and food at Zagat, who shouts back. Dietl makes apologetic noises about their choice of restaurant that night.

Zagat waves them away. ‘You're not here for haute cuisine,’ he says to Dietl.

The former cop grins up at him. ‘No. We’re here for pussy.’

Zagat, startled, rocks back on his heels.

‘Oh yeah,’ he says, awkwardly.

I can’t help but look down the table at the two young women, wearing shiny dresses in primary colours with plunging necklines, who are sitting with these old men."

...

...
[Bright Shiny Morning on Amazon]

The best way to meet rich men is to cultivate rich friends. Wealth attracts wealth and this is usually done through introductions. If you don't know any wealthy people, however, don't despair. They're easy to meet.

First of all, find out who they are. Check the society column for weddings and engagements. Not only will you get an idea of who's who, but you'll also find out the names of the most fashionable churches. Claudia, 23, makes it a point to go to Mass in the "better" churches and then mingle with the parishioners at coffee hour following the service.

Another special group of men who lead hectic lives and also put up with a lot of frustration are doctors. They often get rid of their nervous tension on the racquetball court. Check out the health clubs nearest the large teaching hospitals...

[T]here are other ways of meeting doctors. . Hospital cafeterias are particularly good after July 1, when a whole new class of interns arrive. For the first few weeks everyone's eyeing one another—it's just like the first few days of school. Hospital cafeterias are open to the public as well as the staff.

Today's selection comes from Chapter Four: Flirting. It concerns the ways in which women can make themselves more attractive to menfolk.

The first and most effective flirtaphernalia a man notices is your hair, which is why it's probably a woman's most personal and creative accessory. It's one of nature's flirtaphernalia and it should be used to accentuate all your different personalities...

For some around-30 women, tousled, disheveled, and shorter curls look great because it's a youthful, alive look that moves easily into evening. Add a few whimsical feathers for a sexy touch. Or get a pair of oversized, dramatic earrings if you want to accentuate a slicked-back look. Earrings are flitty because men love the little tinkly sound that jewelry makes as a woman goes by...

Cutting your hair short can be an exciting way to change your look.... I never thought of my ears as particularly sexy until one man looked at me dreamily and said, "You have the most sensuous lobes. May I nibble one?"

You needn't go to extremes to be flirtatious. Sometimes a little braid at the side of your face can be more intriguing than a whole head of braids. It's certainly more feminine than simply pulling the hair back with a barrette.

Chieftain Grguch watched the darting and swerving pegasus with amusement and grudging respect. It quickly became clear to him that the ogres would not take the flying pair down, as his closest advisor had predicted. He turned to the prescient Hakuun then, his smile wide.

"This is why I keep you beside me," he said, though he doubted that the shaman, deep in the throes of casting a spell he had prepared precisely for that eventuality, even heard him.

The sight of a ridden pegasus over the previous battle with the elves had greatly angered Grguch, for he had thought on that occasion that his ambush had the raiding group fooled. The flyer had precipitated the elves' escape, Grguch believed, and so he had feared it would happen again—and worse, feared that an elf on high might discover the vulnerable Clan Karuck as well.

Hakuun had given him his answer, and that answer played out in full as the shaman lifted his arms skyward and shouted the last few words of his spell. The air below Hakuun's lips shuddered, a wave of shocking energy blaring forth, distorting images like a rolling ball of water or extreme heat rising from hot stone.

Hakuun's spell exploded around the dogding elf and pegasus, the air itself trembling and quaking ins shock waves that buffeted and battered both rider and mount.

This data is culled only from the first chapter but one can fairly extrapolate that similar proportions will be found throughout the 464 pages of the book. In one paragraph on page 8, he mentions: Ibsen, Chekhov, Shakespeare, Moliere, Aeschylus, Goldoni, Sheridan, Wilde and Maeterlinck.

[Click to enlarge]

Wulfgar shook his head emphatically, silencing her. "I loved you," he said. "I loved you and lost you because I was a fool. It will always be the great regret of my life, the way I treated you before we were to be wed. I accept that we cannot go back, for even if you were able and willing, I know that I am not the same man. My time with Errtu left marks deep in my soul, scars I mean to rease in the winds of the Icewind Dale, running beside my tribe, the Tribe of the Elk. I am content. I am at peace. And I have never been more certain of my road.

Catti-brie shook her head with every word, in helpless and futile denial, and her blue eyes grew wet with tears. This wasn't how it was supposed to be. The five companions of the Hall were together again, and they were supposed to stay that way for all of their days.

"You say that you support me, and so I ask you to now," said Wulfgar. "Trust in my judgment, in that I know what course I must follow. I take with me my love for you and for Drizzt and for Bruenor and for Regis. Taht is ever in the heart of Wulfgar. I will never let the image of you and the others fade from my thoughts, and never let thelessons I have learned from all of you escape me as I walk my road."

"Your road so far away."

Wulfgar nodded. "In the winds of Icewind Dale."

"Karuck?" asked Ung-thol, a shaman of high standing. "Could it be any other?" replied Dnark, chieftain of the tribe of the Wolf Jaw. Both turned to regard the smugly smiling shaman Toogwik Tuk as Dnark remarked, "Your call was heard. And answered."

Toogwik Tuk chuckled.

"Are you so sure that ogre-spawn can be bent to your will?" Dnark added, stealing the smile from Toogwik Tuk's ugly orc face.

His reference to Clan Karuck as ogre-spawn rang as a clear reminder to the shaman that they were not ordinary orcs he had summoned from the lowest bowels of the mountain range. Karuck was famous among the many tribes of the world—or infamous actually—for keeping a full breeding stock of ogres among their ranks. For generations untold, Karuck had interbred, creating larger and larger orc warriors. Shunned by the other tribes, Karuck had delved deeper and deepr into the Underdark. They were little known in recent times, and considered no more than a legend among many orc tribes.

But the Wolf Jaw orcs and their allies of tribe Yellow Fang, Toogwik Tuk's kin, knew better.

"Speak not his name," Drizzt interrupted. "You know nothing of Bruenor, of his exploits and his judgments." "I know that he was no friend of—" "You know nothing," Drizzt said again, more forcefully. "The tale of Shallows!" one of the dwarves roared. "I was there," Drizzt reminded him, silencing the fool. The human spat upon the ground. "Once a hero, now gone soft," he muttered. "On orcs, no less." "Perhaps," Drizzt replied, and in the blink of an astonished eye, he brought his scimitars out in his black-skinned hands. "But I've not gone soft on highwaymen and murderers."

Black boys, much more than girls, feel the need to carry on these traditions as part of their identity of being hot and/or cool. When boys hang on to so-called Black English in the classroom and verbal confrontations in the street, they may be hanging tough with their homies, but they are handicapping themselves in the game of life. They can "trash-talk" or "play the dozens" better than anyone on the planet, and that still isn't going to get them a job or into college... no matter how often or how publicly they grab their crotches, crotch-grabbing isn't even going to get them a bus ride downtown.

When politicians come courting the black vote, they like to say, "It takes a village." Black people routinely respond, "Well, yes, okay." But no one seems to ask the questions that should come first: What is a village? What makes a village? Who acts for the village? Who speaks for it? One person? Two people?

On child-rearing:

African Americans sometimes use the term whupping when punishing their kids. This may very well have a connection to the slave experience. That isn't like jumping over a broom at your wedding. It is definitely not a part of the slave experience you wan to reenact.

First was Chaucer, then Shakespeare. What would come after?
Ah, old Kierkegaard, of course. We'll wait for "Aye, there's the rub."
We're on chapter four. Could it get any dafter?
We'll find out in this installment of the Gawker Book Club.

"Inside Inside" has eighteen chapters plus an "Afterword....and Foreword." Remember, it's written in concentric circles! Each chapter has an epigraph and each chapter we're amazed at the pomposity of Lipton's choice—that is, save a stretch where he just quotes Sharon Stone, Russell Crowe and other practitioners of the craft of acting.

So you don't have to, we've assembled the best of his epigraph selection which, coincidentally, make up the best writing in the whole megillah.

Chapter I: "And glady wolde he lerne and gladly teche" —The Narrator's description of the Clerk in the Genreal Pologue of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales

Chapter II: "Suit the action to the word, the word to the action." —Hamlet's advice to the players

Chapter III: "Do you know that there comes a midnight hour/When everyone has to throw off his mask?/Do you believe ithat life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you an slip away a little before midnight?" —Soren Kierkegaard, Epigraph in Rainbow at Midnight by Lawrence Lipton

Chapter IV: "Beginner's, please!" —The British equiavlent of America's "Places, please" signaling curtain time.

Chapter V: "Assez vu. La vision s'est rencontreé a tous les airs..." [Ed. Note: There's a whole quatrain plus the English.] —"Départ," Arthur Rimbaud

Chapter VI: "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower drives my green age." —Dylan Thomas

Chapter XI: "Well, well, well. What's going on here?" —Christopher Reeve, Inside the Actors Studio

Chapter XIII: "Tonight we are going to cook octopus balls!" —Robin Williams, Inside the Actors Studio

Chapter XVII: Croyez ceux qui cherchent la vérité,/doutez de ceux qui la trouvent" —André Gide, quoted by Bernard PIvot in The Craft of Reading

Chapter XVIII: "Meet it is I set it down/That one may smile and smile and be a villain." —Hamlet, Act One, Scene Five

Never has Brainyquotes.com been lassoed so well into the service of mankind's march of progress—or, for that matter, has Robin Williams ever been made to rope the reader into prose even less funny than his own.

I made myself a promise that I would not begin this book with the first-person singular pronoun I... and I've already broken that promise four times—five if you count the pronoun myself, which the Oxford American Dictionary defines as "corresponding to I and me." An unpromising sign.

April may be the cruelest month to Eliot, but to me it's the kindest, with the portents of spring, which is crammed with beginnings. Of holidays, I enjoy Memorial Day because it officially begins the pleasant summer season, and dislike Labor Day because it ends it. Thanksgiving is welcome because it begins the Christmas season, of which I confess to being inordinately fond and I'm resistant to the compulsory joy of New Year's Eve, because it ends it.

This affection for beginnings has had a predictable effect on my preferences. Though I should know better than to invite comparison with my betters as I begin my own literary effort, I confess to unbridled admiration for the blunt simplicity of "Call me Ishmael"; the instant dramatic engagement of "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times"; the authorial certainty of "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way": the ringing challenge of Donne's "Go and catch a falling star/Get with child a mandrake root": the quiet fury of Yeats's "Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon can not hear the falconer;/Things fall apart; the center cannot hold": the stately opening chords of Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings, which greet us not with the C-major tonic but with a submediant A minor chord, as if the boat had left the dock without us, and we had no choice but to jump in and swim after it....