Small Town Corruption Gets the Literary Treatment
Nick Tabor’s excellent “A Town Under Trial” was published in the most recent issue of the Oxford American. In the piece, Tabor examines the twenty-two-year-old murders of two prostitutes in Oak Grove, Kentucky. Situated near the Army’s massive Fort Campbell base, Oak Grove stood apart for a number of reasons outlined by Tabor. As a…
continue readingCould The Juice Get a Book Deal Today?
CNN has a detailed article about how O.J. Simpson could be paroled in October. The piece explains that Simpson has a hearing with the Nevada parole board in July. Famously, an earlier book deal did not end well. Negative reaction to HarperCollins plans to publish If I Did It in 2006 lead to the book’s…
continue readingInvisibility in the Era of Surveillance
The Wikileaks dump yesterday raises a number of questions about privacy in the modern era of what some would call a surveillance state. Most specifically, The New Yorker examines 5 questions about the release. Coincidentally, at the same time, I’m working my way through Kevin Mitnick’s The Art of Invisibility: The World’s Most Famous Hacker…
continue readingBreaking Down the $65m Obama Book Deal
Whatever your politics might be, you gotta be impressed (or frightened) at the gargantuan book deal given to Barack and Michelle Obama. Vox deconstructs the deal and does some math. For example, according to the article, the #3 top seller of 2014 sold slightly more the than 500,000 copies. The Obamas will need to sell…
continue readingTales Book Tops in Service Industry Category
On Friday, Gawker insinuated that the back and forth of will-he-promote or won’t-he-promote discussion of Gay Talese’s new book was a publicity generator. If so, it certainly seems to be paying off. The book is currently the 3,360 ranked title on Amazon. But it is #1 in the Service Industries category. A work about a…
continue reading