Bad News. Bears!

Borders CEO Mike Edwards announced that the struggling bookseller will install Build-A-Bear kiosks in almost all their stores.

Bloomberg

Also, B&N will close its gigantic Lincoln Center store.

NY1

Old News, again.

Letters of Note has posted a copy of a 2006 letter that reclusive Simpson’s character and novelist, Thomas Pynchon, wrote to Ian McEwan’s publisher defending McEwan against charges of plagiarism.

See also, Pynchon comics.

Who ordered the truffle fries?

Being a boy, a white boy at that, and having been in Brooklyn to witness the installation of various organic cleaners and gourmet delis on certain corners of certain blocks, having quite possibly been the inspiration for those new furnishings, I’ve always felt a kinship to Jonathan Lethem. Richard Greenwald has a piece over at the Rumpus on Lethem’s three Brooklyn novels, gentrification, and the underlying question of white urban authenticity.

I’ve been dying to use the Freedom isn’t free, it costs a buck ‘o five lyrics from Team America in reference to Jonathan Franzen’s new novel.

I couldn’t wait, where’s a price war when you need one?

Following the cover of Time Magazine and Michiko Kakutani’s review in the Times, raves continue to pour in for Freedom: also in the Times Sam Tanenhaus calls it “a masterpiece of American fiction,”  Jonathan Jones at the Guardian blog says it’s the novel of the century,  Esquire says the Great American Novel is resuscitated (that review also includes this tasteless little morsel, “David Foster Wallace may have cashed in his chips, but Franzen isn’t just hanging in, he’s doubling down”), Jodi Picoult Tweets about that pesky ol’ white male bias in response to Kakutani’s review, and in a similar vein Jennifer Weiner speaks out about the overcoverage.

I don’t know, anybody read it yet, who here thought The Corrections was worth the hype?

… and in the red corner.

There’s a longish piece in NY Mag about the battle between Ron Burkle and Len Riggio over control of Barnes & Noble.

Amazon is misquoted/taken out of context in the artice, it says that Amazon claimed to sell more eBooks than physical editions, they actually reported selling 180 eBooks to every 100 hardcovers in the months of April-June (paperbacks were not included). We posted that announcement here.

To Balance out all the Great American Novelist stuff that’s been going around

They stopped somewhere short of “worst writer of his generation,” but the Onion’s AV club gives Rick Moody’s The Four Fingers of Death a D+, calls it  “…a waste of trees and time.” Ouch!

Also while I’m referring to The Onion, props for this headline: 164 Closeted Gay Men Having Impressive NFL Preseason.

To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Pau Gasol.

Who said European players were soft?

This is my very first un-Sporting Gentlemen post. Serbian Center Nenad Krstic, who plays for the Oklahoma City Thunder in the NBA, punches a guy in the back of the head a bunch of times and then throws a chair at him in retreat.

ESPN

I know, I know, way too much brawl, but I had to:

Today is the 120th anniversary of H.P. Lovecraft’s birth

In terms of the New York connection, he lived in Brooklyn Heights for a spell and according to his letters and Brad Lockwood’s take in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle didn’t like it very much:

On New Years Eve, 1924 he left Flatbush, moving to 169 Clinton St. in Brooklyn Heights. Offering a snapshot of the era as well as his own psyche, Lovecraft despised the “decrepit” neighborhood (more so its immigrant residents) and may have suffered one of several nervous breakdowns in his tiny first-floor apartment on the corner of State and Clinton streets. But his imagination was never so alive: “Something unwholesome — something furtive — something vast lying subterrenely [sic] in obnoxious slumber — that was the soul of 169 Clinton St. at the edge of Red Hook, and in my great northwest corner room “The Horror at Red Hook” was written,” Lovecraft offered in a letter five years later.

Lovecraft’s Wikipedia entry

Len Riggio excercises stock options…

to improve his positioning in the upcoming proxy fight with Ron Burkle’s Yucaipa Company. I don’t know what that means, but I know that they mean it.

footnoted

NY Observer

Continuing Franzenalooza:

Not quite Kanye, but Jonathan Franzen expresses his “profound discomfort” with making author videos within his very own author video.

Also, recent fiction from The New Yorker: “Agreeable” and “Good Neighbors.”