Jack Romanos, president of Simon and Schuster is retiring, and Carolyn Reidy is in. Looks like Romanos will have quite a bit of spare time on his hands. Might we suggest whiling away the hours with Literary Rejections On Display? We've been hooked for the last couple of weeks: reading about someone else's failures is about as comforting as a good cup of boiling tea in an overly air-conditioned office (the Phoenix HQ has been freezing us out all week).

Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus won the Pulitzer Prize back in 1992. I finished the first book in the two-part series about a month ago in preparation for a visit to Yad Vashem last week. Maus is shocking, tragic, funny, and brutally eye-opening. It's the most beautifully told, gripping account of the Holocaust I've ever read, and I've been reading about it all my life.