This past summer I drove across the country interviewing people who had lost their jobs since 2007 — since the housing market disintegrated, since Lehman Brothers evaporated, since layoffs subsumed the work force. I asked for details about the climactic phone call, the conference room, the look of the sky out the window, the security escort, the drive home: all the particulars of the experience.

I met a mortgage broker who, one morning, learned he had been laid off when he found the door to his office building padlocked. I met an H.R. executive who had laid off a couple of hundred people before she herself was laid off. I met a husband who was laid off two weeks after his wife announced she was pregnant. I met a wife who laid off her husband.

I was collecting these stories for a forthcoming book about the experience of being unemployed. Modeled on Studs Terkel’s “Working,” the genre-defining oral history of what people do all day and how they feel about what they do, this book will be called “Not Working.” Accompanying me on the two-month trip were the filmmaker M J Sieber, who was helping to film a companion documentary, and the playwright Mallery Avidon, who was helping to find subjects, taking notes for a script and discovering a talent for writing haikus. We drove from Orange County, Calif., to New York City in a 1999 Jeep with 142,000 miles on it; we ran on the unexpected and inexplicable stamina that came with hearing mostly demoralizing stories.

Read the full piece in The New York Times T Magazine

Eileen Myles’ Inferno (A Poet’s Novel) is poetry book of the year 2011! Of course, it is a novel—but Myles’ prose is so dense and fun and immediate that it always seems to be saying, “A poet wrote this and I can’t wait to become a poem myself.”

Inferno—a novel with the title of a classic poem. I remind you of this because when you Google “Dante Inferno” the first listing is the digital game: “…battle through the 9 circles of Hell facing fierce and hideous monsters, your own sins, and a dark past of unforgiveable war crimes…” Which sounds like Myles’ Inferno: a coming of age/becoming a poet/coming out/going sober story.

Read the rave review on About.com

Though we’re delighted to have our own online toystore up this holiday season, there are a thousand things we could recommend from elsewhere. Cutting it down to a couple of hundred, for our fourth annual gift guide, wasn’t easy; this year was a fantastic one for books, games, gadgets and much else besides. From stocking stuffers to silly cars, take yer pick.

See the list in Boing Boing

The Global Thinkers’ Book Club

Want to think like the world’s best minds? Start by reading like them. The FP Global Thinkers’ 20 most recommended titles.

Read them in Foreign Policy

Earlier this year, O/R Books published Tweets From Tahrir, a compilation edited by Alex Nunns and Nadia Idle that told the story of the protests to oust Hosni Mubarak from Twitter missives sent as the protests unfurled. With thousands of demonstrators now back in Tahrir to advocate for a handover of power from military to civilian rule, O/R has compiled a live Twitter feed from contributors to its original compilation — perhaps as they Tweet out a sequel in real time?

Read the article in The New York Observer

The aerial pictures showed an impressive mass of humanity in Tahrir, but it is on Twitter that the extraordinary individual stories of the Egyptian revolution can be found.

So we can glimpse events through the eyes of Mahmoud Salam, or @Sandmonkey, one of the most prominent bloggers in Egypt. Yesterday he set out to Tahrir from Heliopolis across the city in a convoy of vehicles, a “car march”. “All hung the gasmasks outside the car and blew their horns, all the way to #tahrir. Many people joined,” he tweeted.

Read the full article in The Guardian

Today a new website has been launched that, in real time, relays key information from the front line of the Egyptian revolution. Tweetsfromtahrirlive.com groups together a selction of high-quality tweeters who have participated in the Egyptian uprising. The website notes that its stream of activists is not comprehensive, but it’s nonetheless a vital source of knowledge of developments on the ground.

Read the full article in the New Statesman

Today, from the publisher that first used Twitter to document history in book-form, comes a new website that takes the original book live – relaying, in real time, key dispatches from the front line of the Egyptian revolution.

In April OR Books published Tweets from Tahrir, edited by Nadia Idle and Alex Nunns, a book composed of Twitter posts from Egyptians who, over 18 historic days, helped topple Hosni Mubarak. With Egypt now in the midst of massive new protests against military rule, OR Books, together with digital design firm Sonnet Media, is launching Tweets from Tahrir LIVE, a website carrying current, real-time tweets from the activists featured in the original book.

The launch of the site is in response to the deadly attacks on protestors in Tahrir Square, which have seen activists once again using Twitter to get the word out about the surging movement for democracy and the vicious repression it faces. Tweets from Tahrir LIVE provides riveting, direct coverage of the events in Egypt, through the words of trusted, eloquent tweeters.

OR Books co-publisher Colin Robinson comments:

“Tweets from Tahrir was the first book of its kind, capturing fleeting tweets and pinning them permanently to the printed page. This is the reverse – it’s the same contributors who appeared in the book, but here they are live. We’re giving people a way of following what’s happening in Egypt, minute-by-minute. It’s vital to the protestors who stood up so bravely in January and February, and are now having to do it all over again, that the world sees what’s going on. This is our small contribution to helping with that.”

Visit the site here: tweetsfromtahrirlive.com

Nathanael West fans are a disparate bunch. W.H. Auden, Matt Groening (there is a bookkeeper character in West’s 1939 novel The Day Of The Locust called Homer Simpson), F Scott Fitzgerald and Johnny Depp are all West fans.

It’s been more than 40 years since a biography of West and now, around 70 years after the American’s untimely death at the age of 37, Joe Woodward has written a new account of West’s life.

West, described by the author as a ‘homicidal driver’, was killed on 22 December 1940 as he was returning from a hunting trip in Mexico. He failed to stop at an intersection in California, drove straight into a car with a family and ended up fracturing his own skull. His new bride, Eileen McKenny, was killed too, leaving behind a young son from her first marriage.

Read the full review in The Telegraph

How will Occupy Wall Street be remembered? It ought to be to the advantage of OWS that some of the world’s best writers are supporters of “the 99 percent.” A number of staffers from the journals n+1 and Dissent, among them Keith Gessen, Kathleen Ross, and Sarah Leonard, were arrested along with dozens of other protesters on Thursday (which marks two full months for the movement)—The Day of Action.

Yet progressives are often disillusioned by their own causes—in hindsight. Give them enough time and their unwillingness to be delusional sometimes works against them in this age of maximal American confidence. In the beginning of the book The Sixties, author and activist leader Todd Gitlin (who’s on the board of Dissent) tells his readers that the question he’s most often asked is what that decade has accomplished, besides giving us tie-dye shirts. Through more than 400 pages, Gitlin, now a journalism and sociology professor at Columbia University, shows us that the years were filled with “wrong turns and missed opportunities.” “The riptide of the Revolution went out with the same force it has surged in with, the ferocious undertow proportionate to the onetime hopes,” he writes—not exactly a ringing endorsement. And those were the days of the civil-rights breakthroughs and the antiwar movement!

Read the full article in The Daily Beast

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.

Previous contributors include Bret Easton Ellis, Kate Christensen, Kevin Brockmeier, George Pelecanos, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, David Peace, Myla Goldberg, and many others.

Joe Woodward’s Alive Inside the Wreck is the first biography of Nathanael West in over 40 years, and creates a vivid portrait of the man, the writer, and his work.

Read his playlist in Largehearted Boy.

One of the lawyers assisting Occupy Wall Street is Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights, whom the Guardian quoted yesterday: “This movement is ultimately not about what happens in the courts, it’s about what happens in the streets.”

Read the full article in Mondoweiss

Mark Folse of ToulouseStreet.net provides the post-mortem on a publishing throwdown at last week’s Words & Music Fest

Will Murphy, executive editor at Random House was the nominal moderator until the fist chair flew. It was billed as “New Designs in Publishing in the Digital Age, just another equanimous panel discussion at the staid Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society’s annual Words & Music Festival, until e-publisher John Oakes came off ropes like a glory-hungry luchador going for the title belt.

Oakes, a graduate of the Big Six before he started alternative e-publisher OR Books, started softly. “I don’t think [e-publishing} is going to be the only way, but it’s going to be one way.” His tag team partner Julie Smith, Edgar-winning mystery novelist turned e-publisher of BooksBnimble, started out equally calm. “I was published by Big Six publishers for a long time but it became something very different for fiction writers.”

Read the full article in Nola Defender

In 1995, Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, filed a Freedom of Information Act request for documents about the C.I.A.’s involvement in the death of Che Guevara in Bolivia. Years passed — 16 of them — and Mr. Ratner forgot that he had ever sent the letter. But he was still living in the same apartment and one day some documents from the government began trickling in through the mail. With new information he now says definitively dispels “the myth that the United States was not involved in the order to kill Che,” Mr. Ratner decided to write a small book, joining forces with another attorney, Michael Steven Smith, to produce Who Killed Che? How the C.I.A. Got Away with Murder.

Read the full article in The New York Observer

My girlfriend got me an Eileen Myles t-shirt at this Sister Spit event in Oakland, it’s black with big purple letters reading “YOU’VE GOT THE STYLE EILEEN MYLES.” I wore it for the first time in Palm Springs to a Dinah Shore White Party which is a party where everyone wears white. And Dinah Shore is this gross annual lesbian “weekend” for girls who want to fingerfuck in swimming pools, oil wrestle in wet t-shirts, drink their faces off and scream at each other in public. All the lesbian websites send reps to Dinah Shore so we were there like a bunch of pasty nerds at a football game, and I was there in my black pants and black Eileen Myles t-shirt at The White Party and then suddenly everything turned black and then I wasn’t anywhere anymore. I was carried and I could hear things, like my friends saying I’d only had one drink and that my face was blue. Some minutes later in the hotel room as the EMTs were attaching things to me and announcing my alarming blood pressure I apparently garbled “it’s over,” to my friend Sarah. “It’s all over, Sarah. This is it.” Ha! She told me I’d said it a few times: “This is it, it’s all over. It’s all over. This is the end.”

Read the full piece on Emily Books Blog

The progressive press OR Books has announced the publication of an instant history of the anti-capitalist protest: Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed the Course of America. It is written by Writers for the 99% who do not claim to officially represent the movement, but actively support it and have come together specifically for this project. Copies of the book will be available on 17 December- the three month anniversary of the movement’s beginnings in Liberty Square, downtown Manhattan. All profits from the book will go to the occupation.

Read the full article in The New Statesman