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Barnes & Noble has dropped the price of its 3G Nook from $259 to $199 and has confirmed its new Nook Wi-Fi will sell for $149. You can order either online at B&N or Best Buy, and the device should begin shipping this week.
B&N expects the devices to be available at select stores later this month and in all stores later this summer, reports TechCrunch, which also writes that B&N is also offering customers complimentary access to AT&T's Wi Fi network.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and historian Rick Atkinson has been awarded the 2010 Pritzker Military Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing.
The prize comes with prestige - and an honorarium of $100,000.
Atkinson won Pultizers for his work as a journalist for The Washington Post and for his book An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943, the first in his "Liberation" trilogy charting the course of World War II. The second is The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944; he's working on the third now.
Jennifer Egan is stylistically fearless and eerily prescient, but what makes her new novel one of summer's best reads isn't solely its unconventional Mobius strip of a plot, its postmodern reconstruction of our pop-culture-and-PR-addled world or even its clever use of the music business to chart our past and future. When all these elements combine with flawed but irresistible characters, A Visit from the Goon Squad flares into
flamboyant life. It mulls the sort of big-picture ideas good novels ought to ponder.
How do our lives get from point A to point B? And - maybe more crucial - how do we handle drastic change? To answer such questions, Egan, who used Gothic sensibilities to explore our obsession with the digital world in her previous novel The Keep, gets even trickier now. But despite its whiff of experimentation, Goon Squad is fast and pleasurable, a page-turner simply because you have no idea in which direction the
narrative will spin next. It's a Coltrane jazz riff. Every chapter could stand alone, but each story resonates with the next, making the whole all the more powerful.
The wellsprings of the novel are corporate music executive Bennie Salazar and his assistant Sasha. Purely for the challenge, she steals things - wallets, notes, bath salts, a screwdriver - and displays them on tables in her apartment. He sprinkles flakes of gold in his coffee. "Gold didn't tarnish, that was the thing. The flakes would look the same in five years as they did right now.'' We all have our bad habits. The goon who menaces
them and everyone else is Time, which may ignore us when we're young but eventually, when we're not looking, paints a bull's-eye on our backs. Don't sense it yet? Don't worry. You will.
Former punk rocker Bennie traded in his Mohawk for success and a palatial house among the WASP enclaves of upstate New York. Though he knows nostalgia is deadly - once you give in to it, you no longer matter in the way you want to matter - he secretly longs for authentic music. "The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead.''
Other characters pick up different threads of this search for authenticity. Some know Bennie or Sasha; others are tangentially connected. Rhea, secretly in love with teenage Bennie, understands that their slamdancing
gang merely plays at being punks: "When does a fake Mohawk become a real Mohawk? Who decides? How do you know if it's happened?'' Bennie's wife Stephanie knows they don't belong among the blonde, conservative couples but is determined to fake her way to acceptance; after all, she can hold her own on a tennis court. Stephanie's journalist brother aches to discover the person behind a young actress' veneer, but his obsession turns a 40-minute interview into a nightmare.
So, yes, there are downsides to this seeking-something-real business. Down-on-her-luck former public-relations queen Dolly - a swanky party featuring hot-oil props went horribly awry and wrecked her reputation - takes an image-primping job for "the General.'' The pay is so magnificent îîthat it almost obliterated the tiny anxious muttering voice inside her: Your client is a genocidal dictator.''
Other characters don't even try to kid themselves about where we all end up. The goon squad never sits still. Bosco, a once-famous musician now fat, middle-aged and in poor health, wants to tour again even though touring will kill him. "We know the outcome, but we don't know when, or where, or who will be there when it finally happens. It's a Suicide Tour. . . I'm old, I'm sad … that's on a good day. I want out of this mess. But I don't want to fade away. I want to flame away.''
Egan deftly examined such notions of identity and reality in her terrific Look At Me, and she's equally adept here at ferreting out our worst impulses and exploring how they will translate in our technologically shifting future. Communication is changing already: Sasha's daughter narrates her section of the book as a sort of Power Point presentation that's shockingly easy to follow. Let's just hope Egan's depiction of infants who demand handsets to download music never comes to fruition.
But of course the future always feels less bearable than the past. Maybe that sensation makes Boscos of us. Better to burn out than to fade away. When one of Bennie's proteges texts "wat nxt?'', we shudder a little. But bright and agile talents such as Egan must stop and ask: "wat nxt? wat nxt indEd.''
From the Associated Press:
"Jose Saramago, who became the first Portuguese-language winner of the Nobel Literature prize although his popularity at home was dampened by his unflinching support for Communism, blunt manner and sometimes difficult prose style, died Friday.
Saramago, 87, died at his home in Lanzarote, one of Spain's Canary Islands, of multi-organ failure after a long illness, the Jose Saramago Foundation said.
Saramago was an outspoken man who antagonized many, and moved to the Canary Islands after a public spat with the Portuguese government in 1992."
His books include Blindness, The Cave, The Double, Seeing and Death With Interruptions.
"White Cat (The Curse Workers Book 1) by Holly Black. Sharp, vivid prose illustrates a dark world of magic and cons, where no one is quite what they seem. A compelling read that left me longing for the sequel.''
ALYSON NOEL, author of The Immortals
Noel appears at 8:30 p.m. June 23 at Books & Books, 265 Aragon Ave. in Coral Gables
Much as it causes me deep physical and psychic pain to even consider reading a self-published manuscript, I have to say that I truly enjoyed writer Boyd Morrison's column over at the Huffington Post on how he self-published his thriller The Ark on Kindle - and, due to the book's popularity, ended up getting a four-book contract with Touchstone Books, a division of Simon & Schuster.
I can't tell you if The Ark - a DaVinci Code-style thriller about a search for Noah's Ark to prevent the end of the world - is a good read, but Morrison's column certainly is. And while his success is at this time the exception rather than the rule, you have to wonder how many other authors will catch a break this way.
Within a month of being available for download on Kindle, Morrison writes, "The Ark, which was getting excellent reviews from readers, reached number one on the Kindle store's technothriller bestseller list, higher than established authors like Tom Clancy and Brad Thor. In three months, my three books sold 7,500 copies and were selling at a rate of 4,000 books per month." Yep. Those figures will catch someone's eye.
Not content to let the New Yorker's list of "20 under 40" of influential young writers stand, The Millions offers its own list of a different but equally deserving 20 more under 40. And why not? That's the point of list, right - to argue about what's best or worst?
The Millions' list includes Mischa Berlinski's excellent Fieldwork, about an American ex-pat in Thailand unraveling a mystery (it's now in paperback) and Julie Orringer (at right), author of the sensational collection of short stories How to Breathe Underwater and most recently the novel The Invisible Bridge. The list also points out that some damned good writers - Brady Udall, Nathan Englander, Danzy Senna - just turned 40. (Let me use this time to repeat that Udall's The Lonely Polygamist is one of my favorite novels of the summer. Read my review.)
Most important: The Millions tells us with great relief, is that there are tons of promising young writers out there. Whew. Good to remember.
Sink your teeth into this: Author Charlaine Harris joins such luminaries as Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, Margaret Thatcher and Oprah Winfrey this month as a comic book hero.
Harris - creator of the bestselling Sookie Stackhouse novels (and the HBO series True Blood, a gory good time if ever I saw one) - will be featured as part of Bluewater Productions "Female Force" series. The edition, which goes on sale June 16, will cover the author's career (she's written more than 30 books), the evolution of Sookie Stackhouse and what she thinks about True Blood.
What makes this edition special is Harris' participation in it; writer Kim Sherman interviewed Harris, and a lot of what she said apparently made it into the comic.
The Harris issue will eventually find its way into a graphic novel including other popular novelists Stephenie Meyer, Anne Rice and J.K. Rowling. (Ricke's bio comic arrives in stores in July.)
For my part, I have to confess that while I've never read the Sookie Stackhouse novels, I am partial to True Blood, thanks in part to the frequent almost-nudity of Vampire Eric over there on the left.
It's amazing what still shocks people. Example: This amusing story from the Associated Press:
"Apple said Tuesday that it was mistaken in restricting images for iPad apps for Robert Berry's comic book edition of Joyce's Ulysses, which contains nudity, and for panels showing two naked men kissing in Tom Bouden's graphic novel of Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest.
Spokeswoman Trudy Miller said developers had been allowed "to resubmit their original drawings'' and use the original artwork.
Ulysses, a landmark of modern fiction, was the subject of a 1930s court case that ended with a federal judge ruling the novel was not obscene. Wilde's mockery of Victorian morals made him a scandalous figure in late 19th-century England."
