Rage against the macheese

"[Burn This Book is] a slim volume, one that can be read in an afternoon, but don't let this fool you into thinking it lacks power. Morrison's—and the book's—central thesis is true, if not necessarily original: 'A writer's life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.'

"It's the book's writing quality, itself, that speaks the loudest. Given our Internet world of lazy thinkers, it's almost a shock—certainly, an awesome delight—to read writers of such caliber take on threats to reading's very existence....So Pamuk, also a Nobel Prize winner and Turkish free-speech advocate, chronicles in "Freedom to Write" how shepherding Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter inside Turkey's post-coup 1980s crackdown years helped to infuse his writing with a sense of political angst. Novelist Ed Park, a Web columnist for The Times' book section, rages at book censorship in an odd, futuristic Q & A about Robert Cormier's "I Am the Cheese" (1977), banned in the late 1980s by the school superintendent in Bay County, Fla.

—L.A. Times

Tall cotton

Burn This Book is a Buffalo News Editor's Pick. Jeff Simon calls it "a superb, wildly disparate collection of writers being brilliant about the beleaguering of their own profession—everyone from John Updike, Salman Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk, Russell Banks, Paul Auster and Nadine Gordimer to Pico Iyer, Francine Prose and former Buffalonian Ed Park (walking in tall cotton)..."

Suddenly this spring

Ed's piece "The Sudden Sharp Memory," about Robert Cormier's novel I Am the Cheese, will appear in Burn This Book (Harper Studio), edited by Toni Morrison, this May. Contributors include Paul Auster, Russell Banks, Nadine Gordimer, John Updike, and others.