And it’s not looking too pretty. The New York Times review begins:
Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, “Against the Day,” reads like the sort of imitation of a Thomas Pynchon novel that a dogged but ungainly fan of this author’s might have written on quaaludes.

Milton Friedman, a Nobel Prize winner, architect and leading advocate of free markets, and one of the most important economists of the 20th century, died this past week at 94.
The University of Chicago, where Friedman taught since 1946, has collected a series of articles reviewing his life and accomplishments.

If you have some time on your hands, you can download and listen to a complete audio version of Plato’s Republic on your iPod. Divided into 12 installments, this monument of political theory is written in dialogue form. And it certainly helps that these dialogues are read by an actor.

Yale announced yesterday that it’s joining the podcast revolution, and they’re doing it with a little bit of ooomph. (If you have iTunes, click here to enter Yale’s collection. If you don’t, you can download it here from Apple for free.) What you’ll find on Yale iTunes are free lectures by Yale’s big hitters.

There’s more to Google Book Search than a good lawsuit.
These days, they’re serving up the classics — all in the public domain
– for free. Literary folks can now read and search the complete
collection of Shakespeare’s works. And, in some cases, you can even
download PDF versions to your computer.

Day after day, on campuses across the country, professors impart invaluable knowledge to students. And, somewhat unfortunately, this knowledge has been traditionally disseminated only so far — which is to say not beyond the classroom walls.
We’re perhaps at the early stages of seeing this change.

Thomas Pynchon has made a career milking elusiveness for all its worth. His writing is notoriously hard to pin down. Publishers never know when to expect something new. (He has only put out 6 books since 1963.) And, physically, Pynchon is nowhere, ever, to be found.
But this much we know right now.

Dave Eggers entered the literary world with a big bang. His first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), came out of nowhere and sat on the bestseller list for 14 weeks. It also made Eggers a Pulitzer Prize finalist and almost the recipient of a rich movie deal — had he not turned it down.

As Bob Woodward’s latest book climbed the bestseller charts last week, the personal fortunes of Don Rumsfeld tumbled. The one man’s rise and the other man’s fall were not totally disconnected.

Seymour Hersh almost seems out of place in our era of soft pedal journalism. Looking at his track record, he knows one way to approach a story, and that is with intensity and no punches pulled.