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.

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

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

The publisher responsible for “Going Rouge: Sarah Palin — An American Nightmare” will publish a book about the Occupy Wall Street movement in December.

OR Books said “Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America” will be written by Writers for the 99%, a group of writers and researchers who are actively supporting the movement.

Read the full article in The Washington Post

How do you tell the story of Occupy Wall Street? An anonymous collective called “Writers for the 99%” is trying to do just that, creating a book for progressive publisher OR Books using a revolutionary writing method inspired by the movement’s own democratic structure.

The book was announced yesterday, and OR Books co-founder, Colin Robinson, told The Huffington Post that their chosen writing method is both “terrifying and exhilarating.” He spoke to us on the telephone from his home in New York.

Read the interview in The Huffington Post

​Occupy Wall Street, largely organized and advertised on the Internet, has spawned a surprising amount of old-fashioned print media, including the Occupied Wall Street Journal and n+1’s Occupy! gazette. Now the next step is here: an Occupy Wall Street book.

The book is being put out by OR Books, the small independent publishing company that’s behind Sarah Palin essay collection Going Rouge. The working title: Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed the Course of America. The author: a collective called “Writers For the 99%.”

We spoke with OR Books co-founder Colin Robinson today (who also gave an interview to Daily Intel). He wouldn’t tell us who exactly was writing the book, though he’d allow that “there are some quite well-known writers involved in this.”

Read the full article in The Village Voice

Progressive publishing house OR Books will release a 200-page first draft of a history entitled Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action That Changed America as soon as December 17, using volunteers from the movement’s Education and Empowerment Committee, and including work by both “sympathetic writers and people who are active in the occupation,” OR co-founder Colin Robinson told New York. The book’s release date will mark the protest’s three-month anniversary — assuming it survives the onset of winter. By then, the demonstrations will have already have been the subject of an MTV special and plenty of news coverage, but Robinson hopes his “interventionist book” will provide the most extensive chronicling so far. “Although you can’t deliver definitive opinions at the moment or set out a course of action, you can record the details of what has happened so far in Zuccotti Park,” he said.

The publisher — whose anti-Sarah Palin essay collection Going Rouge wound up a New York Times bestseller — will release Occupying Wall Street as a print-on-demand product and independent e-book, with all profits going back to the occupation.

Read the full article in New York Magazine

Nathanael West was born on Oct. 17, 1903 in New York City in a house his father built. West, like his father, was an ambitious builder — but instead of hotels and apartments he constructed small, lyric novels out of plans and schemes. In spare and haunting prose, West worried over America as it battled the Great Depression and the beginnings of World War II. His two most recognized works are surely Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and The Day of the Locust (1939).

West loved dinner parties and parlor games. As I did research for his biography at the Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif., I came upon a cache of letters and taped interviews that an earlier biographer (Jay Martin) had secured and saved. Martin’s respondents were, in each case, discussing their association with and knowledge of the real Nathanael West — or “Nat,” as some of them called him, or “Pep” as still others called him. No one called him by his real name: Nathan Weinstein.

Read the full article in The Huffington Post

Bill McKibben is one of the most effective and widely-respected writers on environmental issues today. Starting with The End of Nature in 1989, he’s written and published a long line of powerful works that make complex environmental issues accessible to a general audience.

In recent years McKibben has taken a more active role by organizing and inspiring people across the planet to work toward addressing global warming. In 2007 he founded Step it Up, which organized hundreds of rallies throughout the United States demanding that Congress take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In 2008 Bill co-founded 350.org, a global grassroots campaign that has since ignited a spark in the international and domestic environmental movements.

Read the full interview on firedoglake.com

“There are plenty of people who will write for free.”

Jason Boog has heard this argument before.

“‘Writers are complaining? There are more pressing issues in the world today.”

He’s heard that one too.

“The publishing industry is scaling right back. Newspapers are disappearing. Stores are undercutting publishers’ prices. Jobs are non-existent. New formats are slashing prices.”

Boog is quoting arguments that were spoken not yesterday, or last year – but more than 80 years ago, during the Great Depression. This was a time when the publishing seemed to be about to collapse, yet writers believed in a new kind of industry, and helped to build it through organized dissent.

As he works on a new book exploring parallels between then and now, Boog is wondering if such moves could be possible today – and if writers could ever organize themselves in such a manner again.

Read the full article in The Huffington Post

For now, the book tends to carry more weight than individual tweets, photos, or articles in newspapers and magazines. But that may be a historical anomaly – the fact that printed books have traditionally been of a certain length and have taken time to assemble and publish. As ebook publishing speeds up, the line between books and extended magazine articles will blur. “There are people who insist that a book is a narrative form that is transhistorical,” says Colin Robinson, co-founder of OR Books. “I suspect books have been defined as what a binding machine is able physically to hold together. If you remove the constraint, you are left with a continuum between a tweet and a tome.”

Read the full article in The Financial Times

With his much-touted list of prominent scientists who dispute global warming, Senator James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) is a leading voice in climate skepticism. Yet some diligent sleuths, as well as other scientists, have uncovered awkward facts about his list (now in its fourth year and third iteration). First, Inhofe has received at least a million dollars in campaign contributions from big oil and gas; and to take the original list as an example, 84 of his 400 skeptics likewise have industry ties. Equally awkward are these people’s questionable credentials: 44 are TV weathercasters, 20 economists and 70 simply experts in nothing germane to climatology. Worst of all, increasing numbers of Inhofe’s skeptics have turned out to be climate change believers, and despite repeatedly trying to dissociate themselves from the list and asking to be removed from it, remain on it anyway.

Just as the scientific consensus on climate change is well-established, so too the reasons for the denial are clear. Our civilization runs on the fuels causing climate change, so there are many vested interests that will do their utmost to suppress information about these fuels’ harmful effects. Deniers may relish the chance to attack the scruples of climate scientists in the wake of ClimateGate (never mind that these scientists were subsequently cleared of any unscrupulousness), but the example of Senator Inhofe and many others show that the deniers have committed their own share of fraud. They also constitute an infinitesimal minority of the scientific community—numbering about a half-dozen—that has been granted grossly disproportionate airtime, receive their funding from oil companies and keep repeating the same old arguments in broken-record style.

Read the full review in Energy Bulletin

Egypt’s 2011 protests have been fueled by the music of its slogans and chants, which have become a group exercise in the construction and reconstruction of meaning. Beyond Tahrir, a global audience has wanted to listen in, and two recent books have opened it up to English-language audiences: Tweets from Tahrir and Messages from Tahrir. The former is the first book in English to give voice to what happened in downtown Cairo’s main square, and early in the process its editors decided to forgo translation and use only tweets originally written in English. Editor Alex Nunns said that many of the Arabic tweets contained too much information for 140 English characters, and that “it would have looked false if some tweets had been really long.” Messages from Tahrir, on the other hand, is a photograph-heavy book that displays many of the signs and slogans of the square. Its editor, Karima Khalil, had no choice but to translate the sometimes-rhyming, often-humorous snippets of Arabic. In so doing, she confronted many of the difficulties of a translator of poetry. Poetry has its own linguistic concerns—surprise, echo, sound—but both verse and slogans often require that the translator work in tight, idiomatic spaces where there is little room to balance one part of the text with another, to lose and make up ground.

Read the full article in The Believer

Ever wish you could visit the locations in your favorite novels?

In our new Book Maps feature, we will interview an author or biographer about locations in their book. We will also create a special Google Map about the interview so you can take a walking or driving tour through the book in real life. Email GalleyCat if you have other Book Map suggestions.

For our first installment, we asked Joe Woodward to share the places where novelist Nathanael West lived and worked in Los Angeles in the 1930s. Woodward took us on a book tour of Alive Inside the Wreck: A Biography of Nathanael West. The Google Map is embedded above–click on the blue pins for more details about a specific location.

Read the rest on GalleyCat

The New York artist Michael Waugh’s T features, at a glance, three gorgeous, menacing eagles intertwined to form the rather gothic moniker of this magazine. What is less apparent is that every line, every feathery stroke of Waugh’s pen and ink drawing, contains words, and specifically the words that were tweeted from Tahrir Square last February, which preceded the fall of Hosni Mubarak and his government. Scroll across the work above and glimpse an account of a revolution in progress.

See the artwork and listen to Michael Waugh discuss his design in T Magazine.

Watch the video on the NOT WORKING Kickstarter page.

My good friend, Bill McKibben, has edited a fantastic book of texts, excerpts, speeches, testimony, and writings from a wide-variety of voices on the climate crisis. The book begins with Nobel Prizewinner Svante Arrhenius’ writing from 1896 about the rule of fossil fuels in temperature rise and includes pieces from my mentor Roger Revelle, Jim Hansen, President of the Maldives Mohamed Nasheed, and the wonderful writer Betsy Kolbert.

As Bill writes in his introduction, “We need to feel what’s happening, not just in our overheating bodies but in our minds and spirits too.”

View the journal entry here.

The new book GWR: The Global Warming Reader leaves a reader wondering why, given the evidence, there’s not a robust movement to replace the causes of the warming. But the situation is unlike any other that’s arisen, and our historical models of resistance or mobilization may mislead us. Many of these differences are painfully apparent to those trying to build a movement; in the aggregate they are daunting and suggest the need for some additional tactics, including a kind of initiation.

First, the differences:

For example, the danger of global warming is not marked by an attack. Global warming has produced no Pearl Harbor, no “day of infamy” that’s sudden and unambiguous. In the case of an attack, we know what to do.

The cause of the crisis is not some foreign foe who can be hated. The greenhouse gases have been emitted largely by industrialism (at home and displaced) and vehicles driven by us humans and our ancestors.

Unlike a war mobilization, we have no assurance of renewed growth after the emergency. Instead, as peak oil analysts tell us, we may have to make do with less energy than we are now accustomed to consuming. If we ever impose a tax on carbon, energy will cost more.

Although Al Gore and some others call global warming a moral crisis, it’s hard to recognize the nature of the decision, in the way we can spot the temptation to steal or commit adultery or tell a lie or break any of the other Biblical commandments or oppress an outgroup or deny half the population the right to vote.

The inconvenient consequences seem too ghastly to be believed: nothing so bad could happen, some feel.

Read the full review in Huffpost Green