Stephen Elliott at The Rumpus- “Notes on Book Publishing in a Socially Networked World.” Our main man does some post-game on his Adderall Diaries galley-lending library project. >>One thing to remember: If you don’t write the right book nothing will work. The reader has to connect with the work. I would advise against putting significant time and resources into a work you don’t really believe in.<<

Joann Wypijewski is probably the most incisive and trenchant writer in America  on matters of sexuality and sexual politics.  In this new piece in The Nation, she talks about the profit-motive behind medicalizing sexual behavior- “Sexual Healing.”

Sex has been missing from the healthcare debate. A shame, because sexual health, and disputes over its meaning, reveals most nakedly the problem at the core of a medical system that requires profit, huge profit, hence sickness, or people who can come to believe they are sick or deformed or lacking and therefore in need of a pill, a procedure or device. Case in point: female sexual dysfunction (FSD), said to afflict great numbers of women–43 percent according to some, 70 percent according to others, an “epidemic” in the heterosexual bedroom according to Oprah. Ka-ching!

Over at the Barnes & Noble review site, Maud Newton is onto Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs. >>Since the publication of her first collection, Self-Help, in 1985, so many readers have identified with Moore’s witty, cynical and yearning failed-relationship stories at a similarly impressionable stage that her writing has become as formative an influence on American fiction as her hero John Updike’s was in an earlier era.<<

Oh, hey, special The Nation bonus: William Deresciewicz on a new biography of Marquez, and this classic by Akiva Gottlieb, a great short piece by him on one of my favorite subjects/bands, Against Me!: “Political Punk: Rage Against the Band.”