A well-known principle of academic debate is, "If someone challenges your intellectual credentials, the best way to prove them wrong is to try to sue them into oblivion." So it goes for the poor college librarian who's being sued for millions of dollars over a blog post disparaging an academic publisher. (Ironically,…
You can never be too rich or too thin or have enough portmanteaus for your post-adolescent generation. It's Twixters, now. Who is a Twixter? Everyone, probably. Any woman who has ever listened to music while wearing a hat is a Twixter. Any man who has ever looked at a picture of Mila Kunis is a Twixter. You are, just…
If there is one thing that brings joy to my heart, it is charting the growth of newly invented genres. You can argue over whether trend pieces about "new adult" fiction or "baby boomer" literature are describing truly original developments or ginned-up marketing terms with no relation to measurable changes in…
Random House, the publisher of Fifty Shades of Grey and (every other fact is irrelevant), announced at its holiday party last night that every American employee—thousands of them, anyone who's been with company for a year—will be getting a $5,000 Christmas bonus. "The cheering went on for minutes," says the NYT.
Congratulations 2012 MFA graduates. Kim Kardashian's little sisters Kendall and Kylie Jenner (aged 16 & 14 respectively) announced via E! News Thursday they are writing a book for young adults, to be released next summer.
The number one fiction book in all of America today: soft core spank-sex LOLrotica extravaganza Fifty Shades of Grey. The number two fiction book in America: the sequel, Fifty Shades Darker. The number three fiction book in America: Fifty Shades Freed, the final entry of the "erotic trilogy."
Interested in celebrity dick size? Boy, do I have the book for you: Celebrities with Big Dicks like Jay-Z, Liam Neeson, Colin Farrell, and Many More, edited by one Dana Rasmussen. It's out of stock right now on Amazon—I bought the last copy—but you can order one of three used copies available, starting at the low…
When The New York Times reports on the recent trend of parents self-publishing the books their kids write, they present both sides of the argument. Well, kind of. You've gotta love the way they rain all over the parade of Ben Heckmann, an eighth grader who was profiled by his local news.
In Vogue's "Body Issue" this month, Manhattan socialite Dara-Lynn Weiss opened up about the difficult time she had restricting her daughter Bea's diet. It was very hard, Weiss explained, to "deride Bea for not refusing the inappropriate snack" after the 7-year-old's pediatrician had labeled her "clinically obese."
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…
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."
Courtney Love is writing a book! Or rather, a ghostwriter is being yanked from his bed in the middle of the night, shackled to a desk in an abandoned warehouse, and forced to whittle down 10,000 hours of scrambled spoken thoughts and profanity into something resembling a coherent sequence of ideas expressed in written…
Dudes, the publishing industry is sucking harder than a middle-aged hedge fund manager summiting K2. What it needs is a jolt of hot, unadulterated innovation. Get ready, 'cause Amazon's entering the publishing biz with the world's foremost synergetically awesome innovabro.
Say what you will about Tom MacMaster, the married American grad student who pretended to be a kidnapped Syrian lesbian on the internet—at least he started his horrible fake blog to create (as he put it) "an important voice for issues that I feel strongly about." Well, that, and to cash in on a memoir written from the…
Park Slope parents, your salvation is cometh! You've probably been wondering to yourself, "How are we going to pay for little Maxim's $800 per hour private school tutors in a few years, what with this massive house payment on our Park Slope co-op?" Not to fear! McSweeney's is now accepting your children, for…
In your sun-drenched Tuesday media column: Ed Schultz has opinions still, rape and Twitter debated, newspaper paywall detractors, the Mirror Awards vs. Fox News, and Ken Layne leaves the internet behind.
In your absurd Wednesday media column: a lawsuit against HuffPo proceeds, Amazon dives into book publishing, Bloomberg View is totally out there, the New York Times has a drug pusher's business strategy, and e-commerce is your future.
America's most huggable teddy bear, Dick Cheney, has been working on his memoirs from his CIA-bunker house ever since leaving office. It should have been on bookstore shelves for a year or so by now, former vice president's rather serious heart problems got in the way. But now that's all over! In My Time: A Personal…
Something remarkable happened last Friday. A children's book hit the No. 1 spot on Amazon.com's best-seller list. And it did so a month before the book is even slated for release.
Former Alaskan youth hockey player Levi Johnson, who knocked up Bristol Palin three years ago, was famous for two more years after that, and now is not very famous, has a hot new book comin' out. Deer in the Headlights: My Life in Sarah Palin's Crosshairs will hit stores September 27, and now the cover has been…
