Going away for a bit tomorrow. Bringing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lost World, James Hamilton-Patterson’s Seven-Tenths and A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes. Anyone else have any warm weather book suggestions?

It’s not always easy to accept the reality of what we now routinely allow these people to get away with; there’s a kind of collective denial that kicks in when a country goes through what America has gone through lately, when a people lose as much prestige and status as we have in the past few years. You can’t really register the fact that you’re no longer a citizen of a thriving first-world democracy, that you’re no longer above getting robbed in broad daylight, because like an amputee, you can still sort of feel things that are no longer there.

Rolling Stone doesn’t have Matt Taibbi’s epic takedown of Goldman Sachs posted on their website yet, but the good folks at SomethingAwful have OCR’d the whole thing and posted it.

I have now discovered Livingston Press and like this short story “Real Creamy Ice Cream” from this book called Literature by Catfish Karkowsky. I found out about them from checking out this story “Z and Q” by Krista Madsen at Fiction Circus. (Anyone go to that party last night?)

Jesus Christ, it’s everything we love at once: The Rumpus has an excerpt from Zak Smith’s new book, We Did Porn: Memoir and Drawings, which Tin House Books will publish on 7/1. The excerpt, entitled “Barely Legal Whores Get Gang F**ked,” is a description of Sasha Grey going on the Tyra Banks show, plus some illustrations from the book. Smith, I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, is the author of Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Happy Saturday!

Dear Leader’s book is in. Two things. 1) Book seems to have sustained water damage in shipping. (Har har.) 2) If his description of seeing the book for the first time is accurate, he was naked when he opened the box. NICE!

Storyboards from Michael Bay’s The Great Gatsby