It’s beginning to feel like Nathaniel Rich Month at The Times. The author’s new novel was reviewed in the Arts section on April 10, then again in the Sunday Book Review on April 14. Mr. Rich also wrote an essay for the Sunday Book Review, with many references to that novel, “Odds Against Tomorrow.” In addition, the Editors’ Choice section of the Sunday Book Review listed Mr. Rich’s novel second on its list.

Back in January, Mr. Rich and his brother were also the subjects of a feature story about literary families. (His father is Frank Rich, the former Times columnist; his mother is Gail Winston, an executive editor at HarperCollins; his brother is a comedy writer, a novelist and a regular contributor to The New Yorker.)

Twitter had some fun with potential Geithner book titles today, after the Treasury Secretary announced he’ll be writing on how he dealt with the financial crisis. [gif via this video]

librarianpop:

Newsweek has a great article about the rebuilding of the library at Alexandria this week (January 18, 2013).

Thanks! You can read it in the iPad or online here.

(Source: )

Tom Wolfe remembers his greatest humiliation—that thing that happens in New York City when you try and flag a cab but some assh*le steals it right from under your finger. This happened to Tom Wolfe. In the 60’s. And it still haunts him. 

[This ran with the super longreads piece Tom Wolfe wrote for Newsweek on Wall Street “eunuchs.”]

In 1987, novelist Tom Wolfe evoked the passion of New York and Wall Street culture in the famous book Bonfire of the Vanities. The traders of the 1980s were described as “masters of the universe.” But what’s it like working there today? For this week’s Newsweek, Wolfe revisits that subject by focusing on Wall Street as it is today.

An excerpt:

Up until 2006 a spirit of manly daring had pervaded Wall Street’s investment bankers. Trading stocks and bonds was the next thing to armed combat. The warriors, i.e., traders and salesmen, told of how fighting in combat—confronting not an armed enemy but a fan-shaped array of computer screens—created a euphoria more exhilarating than any other conceivable state of mind. It was the highest of all highs—and thanks not only to the earth-orbiting ecstasy of the battle. There was also the not inconspicuous fact that these Boomtime Boys—many of them in their 20s, still young enough to blush—were knocking back a million dollars or more a year in bonuses, year after year …

Victory as recorded on those screens made them feel like Masters of the Universe. The phrase came from a 1987 novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, whose main character, Sherman McCoy, is a 38-year-old trading-floor salesman for an investment bank averaging a million dollars a year in bonuses and living on the top-nob part of Park Avenue. One day his trading-floor telephone rings, and he picks it up and takes a buy order for so many zero-coupon bonds his commission will be $50,000. Took 20 seconds, maybe 30, and—just like that—he’s $50,000 richer! The words suddenly flash into the Broca’s area of his brain: “I’m a Master of the Universe!” Jesus Christ!—came straight from his 6-year-old daughter’s toy set of plastic figurines, the “Masters of the Universe,” who had names like Ahor, Blutong, and Thonk and look like Norse gods who pump iron and drink creatine and human-growth-hormone smoothies.

In real life, young men on trading floors all over Wall Street read that book and got a kick out of that name, Masters of the Universe. They said it aloud only in a jocular way—they weren’t fools, after all—and never mentioned the wave of exaltation that swept through their very souls: I’m a Master of the Universe …

The market crash in November 1987 didn’t diminish that sublime bliss for longer than a few gulps. Likewise the “dotcom” crash of 2000—02. Even after 2002 the Masters of the Universe cast such a spell that an estimated 40 percent of the top 10 percent of the graduates of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton headed for jobs on Wall Street.

In 2004 a well-known trader for Deutsche Bank, John Coates, a Canadian, absolutely baffled his mates, his fellow warriors of the battle screens, by quitting Wall Street and heading off to England to re-up at his alma mater, Cambridge University, as a first-year graduate student in neuroscience. Neuroscience?! In a Second World country, England?!

The truth was, Coates never got Wall Street off of his mind for a moment. He was intrigued by the fact that a bunch of impulsive, juiced-up, howling, heedless young men had their hands on billions of dollars every day. He was turning to neuroscience in hopes of finding out what on earth could possibly account for… the Masters of the Universe.

Read it online today—or check out the iPad app for a few extra videos we made with the novelist.

Join The Daily Beast’s Book Beast editors for a live chat on Wednesday, 12/12, at 1 p.m. EST, when we’ll talk about our favorite books of the year and help you discover what book to buy for your family and friends.

This is what happens when publicists send us books and galleys hoping for reviews and then a hurricane renders us homeless for two weeks. This is what happens.

[Photos by deputy books editor Jimmy So]

We’ve got Thomas Frank stopping by momentarily to talk about how a buncha billionaries brought about the collapse of the American financial system as we knew it “are putting capitalism and democracy in chains.” Five minutes or so. Taking questions now. Come join us—you can sign in w/ Facebook, Twitter, or email.

To get some idea of its flavor, imagine a world without magic, beneficent protectors, or teenagers interested in anything more than themselves. Imagine a whole town populated and ruled over by Dursleys and a plot that takes most of its cues from The Book of Job and Murphy’s Law, where the strong look after themselves and keep their boots squarely planted on the necks of the weak. It is a novel that begins with a death and ends with a double funeral, and the 503 pages in between conjure a vision of life that is rarely more than nasty, poor, brutish, and short. Oh, and funny.

Malcolm Jones reviews J.K. Rowling’s first adult novel, The Casual Vacancy.

Bret Easton Ellis vs. David Foster Wallace: A Literary Fight (but not the best of all time, clearly)