I just finished Diane Vadino's amazing debut, Smart Girls Like Me, last week. In preparation for the review I've been assigned to write, I Googled around and found her also-amazing and mouth-wateringly delicious fashion-and-shopping blog, Bunnyshop. (Bookmark. This. Now.) For a few days, I've been thinking about all the things I adore about Smart Girls while trying to figure out a way to discuss and justify the fact that it's packaged in a baby-pink cover with a picture of a rack of designer clothing.

Just to make sure, we decided to wait until the Curse of the Hornbino had been demolished by Your 2007 Boston Red Sox before posting the rest of Nick Hornby's Q&A at the Devotion School in Brookline, where the patron saint of record-store geeks and football obsessives appeared last week to read from his so-called young-adult novel Slam, about a Tony Hawk-worshipping teenager named Sam who flees his hometown after knocking up his girlfriend.

Too bad Chris Crocker and his not-fake crying and serious glitter eyeshadow didn't bother You Tubing a video about leaving poor James Frey alone a year ago. Oh well - just watch this and replace "Britney" with "James." So yeah, we thought we were over it but we're not. This week the Observer weighs in on Frey-gate and we can't turn away.

A piece in the New York Times' business section today about author Ayn Rand and her economic legacy got us thinking.

We read all of Rand's fiction back in high school, when we were feeling rebellious and anti-establishment and hating on adolescent suburban sheep (even though, duh, we were one of them).

From the New York Times Sunday Book Review, here's David Oshinsky's great essay about Knopf's biggest (and most regretable) rejections.

See for yourself.

Fourth of July came and went, but post-pyrotechnics, it’s worth remembering the people that lost their freedoms in the political fireworks. Ellee Dean reviews the first two books in the new, eight-volume Penguin Library of Native American History, and asks the question, what if casinos and reservations were our conciliatory prize?

I'm number one!

Philip Roth wins his 3rd PEN/FAULKNER award for Everyman. Finalists included Edward P. Jones (All Aunt Hagar's Children), Amy Hempel (The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel), Deborah Eisenberg (Twilight of the Superheroes), and Charles D'Ambrosio (The Dead Fish Museum).

Girl on the Verge

We’ll admit to being a little jealous of VENDELA VIDA’s charmed writer’s life. She co-edits the Believer magazine, she co-founded the non-profit children’s writing center 826 Valencia, and she lives in San Francisco with her literary-hero husband, David Eggers. Even better, she isn’t afraid to address those huge, ambiguous questions nobody knows the answer to.

Marisha Pessl, literary hotshit of the moment (not according to the Dig) for her debut novel Special Topics in Calamity Physics, wrote an Op-Ed in today’s NYTimes that argues in favor of embracing the nefarious freshman 15. Pack it on, she says, because there’s plenty of time for rules and restraint after you graduate.