TWO OLD PILES OF BONES

On a Canadian TV show John Irving attacks Tom Wolfe: “I can’t read him because he’s such a bad writer,” and dismissed Wolfe’s novels as “yak” and “journalistic hyperbole described as fiction.” Wolfe fires back: “Irving needs to get up off his bottom and leave that farm in Vermont or wherever it is he stays and start living again. It wouldn’t be that hard. Salon

THE UN-E-BOOK

Call them software companies, content-managers or digital distributors, but they all want the same thing: “to fundamentally disrupt the business of book publishing and bookselling — not the writing or editing of books, but everything that happens afterward, or, in New Media- speak, the way it is distributed to, and consumed by, the end-user.” Publisher’s Weekly