I had no idea the Amish were so nasty. But according to the WSJ, books featuring shy Amish ladies befriending handsome non-Amish men—encounters which can sometimes lead to kissing before betrothal—are flying off the the motherfucking racks of the country stores.

Beverly Lewis, who sets her novels among the Amish in Pennsylvania, has sold 13.5 million copies of her books. Wanda Brunstetter's novels take place in Amish communities in Ohio, Indiana, Missouri and Pennsylvania, and have sold more than four million copies...
Barnes & Noble book buyer Jane Love said Amish novels currently account for 15 of the chain's top 100 religious fiction titles. "It's almost like you put a person with a bonnet or an Amish field in the background and it automatically starts to sell well," Ms. Love said.

This shit is even hotter than Tumblr books! Hey Naomi Wolf, A Cultural History of the Vagina? Less vaginas, more bonnets.

Grace's dogged and relentless pursuit of anyone she assumes is guilty made her a very successful prosecutor who only occasionally had convictions overturned because of her misconduct, and it also made her a hugely popular television personality. She is a nightly reminder that It Can Happen Here, and there would be a scary shitload of popular support for some law-and-order type promising to clean up American with lynch mobs (Giuliani '12!).

But she has a book to promote! It's about "Hailey Dean," "a hard-hitting, victim-rights prosecutor in Atlanta who sends hundreds of people to jail" with a murdered fiance.

Please welcome the kinder, gentler Nancy Grace. She is married and has baby twins now and so she is not shouting so much. But she is even more angry about "crimes against children" now, and we should all celebrate her "passion" and her "crusade."

But early reviews have not been kind. Kirkus Reviews calls it "formulaic and simplistic." Publishers Weekly dubs it "less than compelling." There are 70,000 copies after two printings.

Why doesn't America want to read a legal thriller about an idealized Nancy Grace figure?? And will there be sex scenes? (Foster, could you get on this?)

The problem is there is like one easy-to-identify thinly veiled real person, and it's former Post editor Ben Bradlee, and the Bradlee character is a big brave hero, which is how everyone already publicly idolizes him. Actually it looks like all the journalists involved are big heroic hero types!

The novel focuses on fictional reporter Sarah Page at the also fictional Washington Capital, where she "unearths the dark secrets of a powerful lobbying firm, exposing a network of wrongdoing that includes no-bid Pentagon contracts and a powerful holding company that buys favors from members of Congress," Amazon states.

"As she digs deeper, threatening phone calls in the middle of the night warn her that she’s compromising the nation’s safety. Before she’s finished untangling what turns out to be a noxious web of profiteering, a source will be murdered and a car bomb will nearly kill her. And when President Susan Cameron learns what Sarah has discovered, she will be forced to make a choice between her political future and the well-being of the nation."

Christ. Sounds like The Boring Identity amirite?

When New York journos pen novels about the industry, everyone is craven, greedy, and soulless, from the publisher's office to the mailroom. Is Downie's book rah-rah because he was an editor and old-media cheerleader or because Washington journos already see themselves as stewards of democracy or something? Either way, we'll pass on this. Wake us when the next hilariously critical fictional account of Pinch Sulzberger and his Moose drops.

After all, you release some trendy high-concept book, and for every person who reads it there are a hundred who just enjoy the concept and ten people who buy it just to put on the bookshelf. Hell, I had more to say about Freakonomics before I read it than after — I got the point by the time I'd read a review and half of the dust jacket. So if the book doesn't have to live up to its publicity, why not come up with a clever idea and outsource the actual writing?

The text itself is terrible. Here's the opening paragraph:

The deep waters, black as ink, began to swell and recede into an uncertain distance. A gray ominous mist obscured the horizon. The ocean expanse seemed to darken in disapproval. Crashing tides sounded groans of agonized discontent. The ocean pulsed with a frightening, vital force. Although hard to imagine, life existed beneath. It's infinite underbelly was teeming with life, a monstrous collection of finned, tentacled, toxic, and slimy parts. Below its surface lay the wreckage of countless souls. But we had dared to journey across it. Some had even been brave enough to explore its sable velveteen depths, and have yet to come up for precious air...."

But the project itself is ripe for sociological study. It's a fully and publicly documented interaction between over a thousand would-be authors, a postmodern literary critic's orgiastic wet dream. And the recently released analysis from De Montfort is a good read. The researchers study the actions and psychology of the most active editor, "Pabruce," picking apart certain edits, describing his relations with other editors, and guessing at his motives.

This is also the only research paper to ever include the heading "YellowBanana — genius, vandal or troll?"

So Penguin gets some academic attention, some PR, and no real lost respect for this side project. Plus they get to test some tools that might help when they really are farming books out to writing groups. I wish I got that much out of my last terrible novel.

Stephanie Posavec's infographic literary maps have been catching a lot of attention, but let's take a closer look. As NotCot explains, the map represents Jack Kerouac's classic beat novel On the Road, "exhibit[ing] scientific rigor and precision in their formulation: meticulous scouring the surface of the text, highlighing and noting sentence length, prosody, and themes..." But... why?! They look pretty, yet are completely useless, and only notable as an exercise in obsession. Without the explanation, the abstract images might be artistic ad graphics. We're reminded of a word coined by infographics master Edward Tufte: "chartjunk: useless, non-informative, or information-obscuring elements of quantitative information displays." The artist's explanation of how the map was compiled follows.