Patricia Storms strikes again. This time, it’s the publishing industry. Even the LBC “controversy” gets sent up. (via Bookdwarf)

• Cory Doctorow’s Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, a very nutty-looking novel about Alan, the son of a mountain and a washing machine, is, like Cory’s other books, available for download under a Creative Commons license.
• Well beyond the war over “chick lit” (a term that, as far as I’m concerned, refers to those tasty square blocks of gum rather than books) is the more visible war over “women’s fiction.” Elizabeth Berg is the latest to complain.
• In an unfortunate scenario straight out of Nicholson Baker’s Double Fold, Matthew J. Bruccoli has put out a $1,000 reward for missing volumes of the Pottsville Journal between 1924 and 1926. On those microfilms are John O’Hara’s early newspaper work. Bruccoli believes that Gibbsville, O’Hara’s infamous town modeled after Pottsville, was formed in this early journalism.
• An NYU academic claims to have figured out how “The Waste Land” was written. Even stranger, it involves the FBI.

Three strikes against Nick Hornby: Stephen Metcalf, TMFTML and Laura Demanski.

We gave up on the man after How to Be Good and suggest you do the same. Let’s put it this way: he’s the Moby of literature.

The two-day weekend, as we know it, is a mere sixty-five years old. More at Ask Yahoo.

Ayelet Waldman: “Every popped light bulb is a catastrophe, every leaky faucet spells if not the end of the world then surely the beginning of months of crack-assed plumbers hunched over my sinks and toilets, flushing my hard-earned dollars down their mysterious drains.”

Will someone get her a good therapist? Save the Chabon family!