A piece of art about books that you should totally buy. By Jane Mount.

I read something in Esquire the other day that caught me off-guard. It was about how, despite the near-constant bemoaning of our culture's waning attention span and the media industry's cratering business model, we're actually in a Golden Age for writers. The article, by Stephen Marche, makes a pretty good case:

... [T]he world of writing has escaped this mess. Writers are prospering as never before, on all levels. At the very pinnacle, J.K. Rowling is a billionaire. ...

More »

IBM's German subsidiary made the machines that helped the Nazis make sure they were killing enough people.

Any discussion of the Holocaust is a necessarily sensitive one, with the capacity to get tense. Toss in the possibility of an American technology giant working in collusion with the Nazis to track the inhabitants of the death camps, and you've got the makings for one intriguing and possibly uncomfortable discussion.

That's the premise of investigative journalist Edwin Black's 2001 book IBM and the Holocuast, which he will be discussing at 7 p.m. Wednesday at SMU's Hughes-Triggs Student Center, as part of the school's Embrey Human Rights Program. (News broke this fall that Brad Pitt is developing a movie based on the book.)

More »

J.K. Rowling's first novel for adults, The Casual Vacancy, arrived in bookstores yesterday. According to advance reports, the new book contains lots of sex (in the form of "a miraculously unguarded vagina" and a used condom that is "like the gossamer cocoon of some huge grub"), domestic abuse and an endless stream of misery unrelieved by Cheering Charms or Patronuses (Patroni?). Instead, New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani wrote, "this novel for adults is filled with a variety of people like Harry's aunt and uncle, Petunia and Vernon Dursley."

Is this what Harry Potter would have been like without magic, dismal and Muggley with young Harry carted off to an asylum, his spirit broken after the years of abuse he had to endure at the hands of his relatives?

Which made us wonder: What if other beloved children's books had been written for an adult audience instead?

More »

geoffreynunberg.com

See also: Lucien Freud's Portraits are Skilled, Smart and Sad, and He Probably Had Sex with Them

At times like this, I don't mind having two virtually useless degrees in the humanities, though it is a crushing reality that would normally inspire any reasonable person to routinely sob herself to sleep. There is, apparently, new hope for people like us. People aspiring to publish intellectually meaningful books that will, as an added bonus, unflinchingly scandalize our sighing parents and blushing pastors. Assholes, essentially. Nerdy ones, specifically.

Geoffrey Nunberg is a linguist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His new book, Ascent of the A-Word: Assholism, The First Sixty Years, examines the term's movement from purely physiological reference to modern connotations of deluded entitlement.

More »

"The gaming industry didn't set out to be an educational tool," says Meadows School of the Arts Dean José Antonio Bowen, "But we need to be that engaging, interesting and compelling. We need to adopt that energy in order to get students hooked, so that they will want to tackle the subject matter for hours."

Last week, Bowen released Teaching Naked: How Moving Technology out of Your Classroom Will Improve Student Learning, but despite its title, he is hardly anti-technology. In fact, the Dean emphasizes wholly restructuring higher education so that it -- like the journalism industry and the music industry -- can effectively adapt to the changing face of human interaction and learning.

More »

Earlier today, Larry McMurtry, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lonesome Dove, The Last Picture Show and Horseman, Pass By, began auctioning off some 300,000 books from his antiquarian store, Booked Up.

The taciturn man of letters said he does not want to burden his children with nearly half a million titles when he passes. It was time, he added, for the books he had culled and warehoused in downtown storefronts encircling the buff, sandstone county courthouse, to disperse back into the world. This is not the end of Archer City -- a town whose lifeblood is oil and beef -- as improbable literary Mecca.

More »

One of McMurtry's Archer City storefronts.

When Larry McMurtry began writing his memoirs, the first volume of which was published in 2008, he saw it necessary to divide his life into three distinct sections: Books, Literary Life, and Hollywood.

It is no coincidence that Books, the recounting of his life as a "rare bookman," came first, though that might surprise fans of the writer's fiction. Not only did he write an autobiography of the 41-year love affair he's shared with his collection -- and the pursuit of it -- but also Cadillac Jack in 1982, a semi-autobiographical tale of a flea market cowboy, inspired by McMurtry's own experiences digging through the heaps of other men's junk for rare jewels.

McMurtry is one of us, the last few dinosaurs who still line our walls in bound pages and endless shelves. In fact, we might even call him the king dinosaur, Ex Libris Rex. For people like us, the way you stack them and shelve them, the ways the colors match or clash and the fonts juxtapose, is as close to creating "visual art" as we may ever come. But don't think for a moment that it doesn't come from a similarly romantic place. Don't think we have installed them without forethought or intentionality, without hoping new lovers or old friends will notice and thereby notice something significant about us.

More »

Get exposed to literature.

Yes. It's true. Next Friday, August 17, a group of Dallas women will sit proud in front of an audience and read passages from their favorite stories, completely in the nude. It's a literary trend appropriately titled Naked Girls Reading, and now, after a two year hiatus, it's returned to Dallas.

The concept was hatched in Chicago by a couple of burlesque performers. They just thought it would be fun. It wound up becoming a phenomenon. Brainy babes lined up, contributing both their original works and also their favorite short stories, poems and passages to the events. They were passionate. Thoughtful. Naked.

More »

facebook.com/JodiThomasAuthor

New York Times best-selling romance novelist Jodi Thomas sets a lot of her torrid historical tales in Fort Worth, and her latest release -- set to drop on August 7 -- is no exception.

The multiple RITA Award winner's 35th book and 6th in her "Whispering Mountain" series, Wild Texas Rose, draws from her family's oral history of northwest Texas, spanning more five generations.

Inducted into the Romance Writers of America Hall of Fame in 2006, TWU educated Thomas began penning historical romances in 1980 based on dissatisfaction with factual inaccuracies permeating the genre.

Thomas served as West Texas A&M's second writer-in-residence in 2003, and the prolific and popular writer's work has been translated into six languages.

Pre-order Thomas' newest paperback in advance of Tuesday's release.

faculty.smu.edu/loris

Dallas writer Lori Ann Stephens.

This is not Lori Ann Stephens' first rodeo. Well, it is in the sense that it is her debut novel that suddenly shot to No. 1 on the Amazon Bestseller List for Top Free Literary Fiction over the Fourth of July. But that novel -- Song of the Orange Moons -- has existed in print since 2010 when it was picked up by Blooming Tree Press in Austin. Like so many small businesses in an unstable economy, the publishing house unexpectedly and abruptly closed. Stephens felt suspended, truncated, in literary purgatory.

And then came a plan. Stephens had already pursued an ebook publication with ASD Publishing online in an attempt to, as she puts it, "keep the book-child breathing," but despite the efforts, it "sat deathly still on the digital shelf." As an experiment, Stephens decided to run a three-day promotion, making the book downloadable for free for a set period. Though she loved and believed in the novel, no one was more surprised than Stephens when the proverbial stone was rolled away and the book began a meteoric ascension over those three days.

More »