Once more, from J R:

those son of a bitches who still think winning’s what it’s all about give them a string of high p e ratios and a rising market it’s all free enter­prise all they howl about’s gov­ern­ment restraints inter­fer­ence double tax­a­tion, all free enter­prise till they wreck the whole thing they’re the first ones up there with a tin cup whin­ing for the gov­ern­ment to bail them out with a loan guar­an­tee so they can do it all over again…

From William Gaddis’s JR:

Yes no but of course in terms of the ongo­ing sit­u­a­tion down to the bank the infer­ences of a story like this one are ahm…Yes the sug­ges­tion of ahm, of an over­abun­dance of home improve­ment loans and mort­gage risks cal­cu­lated to under­mine con­fi­dence in terms of the ahm, invest­ment con­fi­dence on the part of investors that is to say which is hardly fair to…and yes well in the case of home mort­gages like this which are insured by County Land and Title there should be no…no yes I know the pre­mi­ums are high but of course the ele­ment of ahm…Yes no I wasn’t going to say risk of course but…

The Maytrees, Annie Dillard’s new novel, is out. An ever-​expanding list of reviews fol­lows. Annie read a pas­sage of the novel for NPR and talked a little about the book (whose orig­i­nal sub­ti­tle was “A Roman­tic Comedy about Light Pollution”) in a Pub­lish­ers Weekly inter­view. She did another inter­view with the Wash­ing­ton Post’s Daniel Asa Rose. A chap­ter of the book orig­i­nally showed up as “The Two of Them” in the Nov ‘03 Harper’s.

Here’s the list of reviews:

+Wash­ing­ton Post Book World (by Mar­i­lynne Robinson)

+New York Times

+NYT Book Review

+Boston Globe

+LA Times

+SF Chronicle

+Slate

+Book­Page

+Pub­lish­ers Weekly

+New York Observer

+New York Daily News

+Miami Herald

+Seat­tle Times

+Cape Cod Times

+Cleve­land Plain Dealer

+Chicago Tribune

+USA Today

+Hart­ford Courant

+San Diego Union-​Tribune

+Wash­ing­ton Post (where Annie runs neck and neck with Toby Keith)

Buy it from your local inde­pen­dent book­store or sup­port this site by order­ing a copy from Amazon.

Wu Ming’s new novel Man­i­tu­ana has just been pub­lished in Italy. Read­ers of Ital­ian can down­load the whole book and read­ers of Ital­ian or Span­ish can visit the book’s web­site. This can’t be the first book to have its own trailer, but it’s the first I’ve seen.

You can down­load the rest of Wu Ming’s books at their web­site, includ­ing my trans­la­tions of their sto­ries “In Like Flynn” and “The Emperor’s Three Hun­dred Woodcutters”. You can also find an inter­view I did with the group for Chicago Review’s 60th anniver­sary issue.