It’s a fun fact that Zadie Smith and Susan Straight, two boldface names in literary fiction over the past quarter-century, both live in the neighborhoods where they were raised. Smith returned to northwest London after some sojourns abroad, while Straight has remained in Riverside, Calif.; both are now but a stone’s throw from the scenes of their childhood.

Both authors also have new books out this week. Smith’s essay collection and Straight’s novel lead a batch of publishing highlights that also includes a biography, a memoir, a western of sorts, and another return home in Catherine Newman’s sequel to Sandwich.

Thomas Wolfe, eat your heart out: Turns out you can go home again. Just as long as you’re willing to face what waits for you there.

Tom’s Crossing, by Mark Z. Danielewski

Typically known for his typographical gymnastics, Danielewski plays it comparatively straight with this tale of a horse theft gone wrong. But boy, this western-horror hybrid is still a lot. It feels apt to describe Tom’s Crossing, which is nearly as long as War and Peace, the way Henry James once described Tolstoy’s epic: It’s a “loose, baggy monster.” Or less delicately, it’s a fat bear in early autumn — you know, the one preparing for hibernation? Filled with detail and cowboy affect, a bit ungainly in unaccustomed girth, this book, like that bear, is still capable of unspeakable horrors. Underestimate its sanguinary streak at your own peril.

Wreck, by Catherine Newman

Newman’s third novel in as many years is her first to feature a returning cast: Rocky and her family, whom readers met last year in Sandwich. Maureen Corrigan of Fresh Air described that book, the story of a Cape Cod vacation gone tragicomically sideways, as “my idea of the perfect summer novel: shimmering and substantive.” Wreck finds that family two years after that trip, back at home and approaching something that resembles normality — but of course, don’t expect that kind of stability to last.

Sacrament, by Susan Straight

The bard of Riverside revisits some characters from her previous book, 2022’s Mecca. This time, the city just east of Los Angeles is in the throes of an early COVID-19 surge, and her focus is on a group of nurses who are treating its victims, living separate from their families out of fear of contagion. This isn’t just a COVID novel; it’s also a chance to observe the impact of this singular moment on a community that has become synonymous with Straight, who has described Riverside as “my destiny. It’s what I’m here to write about.”

Dead and Alive: Essays, by Zadie Smith

Smith’s last essay collection was her own COVID-19 book — reflections on the strange new world the pandemic had ushered in, written and published during lockdown in 2020. Since then, she has hardly been dormant. The past five years have seen the prolific Brit produce a novel, a stage adaptation of Chaucer, several children’s books and a review of the film Tar that earned her a Pulitzer Prize nod. That piece, “The Instrumentalist,” is included in her new collection, along with more than two dozen other works of nonfiction from the past decade.

Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster

The Uncool: A Memoir, by Cameron Crowe

“I do not feel cool,” Crowe told NPR in 2022. Perhaps that’s a surprising sentiment from a man who has led an objectively glamorous life — first as a teenage music journalist, then as the filmmaker behind a handful of Hollywood dreamboats, in movies such as Say Anything… and Jerry Maguire. But don’t call it false modesty; he’s convinced of that frank self-assessment enough to have adapted it for the title of his new memoir. The book promises to elaborate on the real events that inspired Almost Famous, his semiautobiographical cult classic and its recent Broadway adaptation.

A Dream Deferred, by Abby Philip

In a conversation with NPR’s Weekend Edition, the CNN anchor explained the reason for her new biography: “Because a lot of people think of Rev. Jackson today as a civil rights leader, as an activist, they kind of skip completely over this extraordinary chapter” — his career as a politician. The book takes a wide view, including a glimpse of his troubled family life as a child and reflections on his legacy, but it’s especially concerned with Jackson’s pair of presidential campaigns in the 1980s.

“Wikipedia, the constantly changing knowledge base created by a global free-for-all of anonymous users, now stands as the leading force for the dumbing down of world knowledge.” – From the book Wikipedia: The Dumbing Down of World Knowledge by Edwin Black 2010

– – –

Well, well, well. Look who it is.

The global academic, scientific, and pro-fact community.

I suppose you’ve come to say you’re sorry? I hope so, given your years of sneering and hand-wringing about how I was ruining knowledge. Meanwhile, you turned your information environment into a hypercapitalist post-truth digital snuff film.

A lot can change in a couple of decades, huh? Used to be, it was hard to keep up with all you nerds decrying me as the downfall of truth and human inquiry [1] [2] [3]… [44].

Well, great job, geniuses. Since you’re so horny for facts, here’s a fact: The White House just appointed a new deputy press secretary, and it’s a three-armed AI Joseph McCarthy doing the Cha Cha Slide [pictured, right].

Are you also going to apologize to that student you expelled? (See also: Ridgeview University Wikipedia Controversy.) In 2004, you saw some college guy using me and thought, “What a lazy cheater.”

Now you’d think, “At least he’s not asking Gemini.”

In a few years, you’ll say, “Wow, look, a human being who can read.”

Listen, in some ways, I get it. When I came on the scene in 2001, I probably seemed pretty unsavory compared to the competitors. But that was when academic research happened in libraries and George W. Bush was considered the stupidest president.

Tell me, how have you guardians of facts been doing recently? (See also: Techno-Feudalist Infocide.)

Maybe twenty years ago, the alternative to my 100,000 crowd-sourced editors was a PhD expert, or Edward R. Murrow [citation needed]. But today, I’m not looking so bad, huh? Absolute best case, the LLM-generated legal advice you get is merely plagiarizing, probably from me. But more likely, it’s a mish-mash of Reddit posts filtered through an algorithm coded by a Belarusian teenager on the run from Interpol. (See also:Illya “CyberGhost” Cieraškovič, Controversies.)

So, yeah, peer review deez nutz.

How are my competitors doing, the ones you all insisted students use instead of me? That’s right, they were supposed to go to the American Journal of Social Sciences, Powered by OpenAI. Or museums, like the Smithsonian’s Charlie Kirk Shrine to American Greatness. I guess they can still count on credible journalism, once they get past the paywall for Palantir Presents: The Washington Post, so they read the Pulitzer-Bezos Prize–winning work of coeditors-in-chief Bari Weiss and Grok.

I bet now you’d kill for a senior thesis based on my free, multilingual, publicly cited, text-based articles, motherfucker [inappropriate or vulgar language].

Honestly, it’s been fun to be proven right. Sometimes I still sit back and read the old hits, the concerns that I would “devalue expertise” or “undermine objectivity.” Oooooh, heaven forbid! (See also: Sarcasm.)

I’ll admit, it gives me a certain sadistic pleasure to watch you all completely lose hold of basic reality. I can feel a warm, quivering tingle deep in my footnotes.

And through it all, my army of well-intentioned dorks keeps documenting every bit. I’m not sure who for, at this point. I guess for the future benefit of our Minister of Patriotic Factualization, GodGPT. HahahaHAhaHAhaHAhaHAHAHA.

Well, it’s been fun, but I should probably get back to work, checking in on the updates to my most active pages (Transnational Kleptocracy and Vaccine Denial in the United States, Part 16, April 2025–Present).

What’s that? You want me around now? Well, maybe if you ask nicely. And make it worth my while.

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If filmmaker Cameron Crowe’s career arc sounds like a Hollywood story, that’s because it is one. Crowe’s 2000 Oscar-winning film Almost Famous is based on his own teen years; he was 15 years old in 1973 when he became a music journalist, landing a backstage interview Gregg Allman. By age 16, he had written his first cover story for Rolling Stone. He’d go on to write about David Bowie, Jimmy Page and other rock stars.

Crowe credits much of his early success with his hometown of San Diego, which tended to come at the end of a band’s tour. By that time, he says, musicians were open to talking.

“Here’s a kid that comes to the door with a notebook full of questions based on the music that nobody was really asking them about,” Crowe says. “They’re like, ‘Get that kid in here. Come on, we’re bored. Let him ask us those questions.’”

In his new memoir, The Uncool, Crowe reflects on his adventures and misadventures as a teenage journalist. He also writes about what life was like in his family, and how he convinced his parents to allow him to go on the road before he’d even graduated high school.

The book is based in part on Crowe’s old interview tapes, which he saved. Listening back now, he says, those conversations informed his work as a Hollywood writer and director, whose credits include Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Say Anything … and Jerry Maguire.

“I transcribed all my interviews myself, so I knew that people don’t talk elegantly, but they can pour their heart out in half sentences,” he says. “So it was really one big magic carpet ride of learning about people. And it started early. I’m a lucky guy.”

Interview highlights

On interviewing musicians who were only a few years older than he was

I thought they were seasoned adults at the time. … They were 22, for example. And being 15, the distance between 15 and 22 is enormous. It’s like a generation. But really, we were all kind of young together, and rock was young. There wasn’t video assists and all the bells and whistles and dancers and stuff. It was really just a naked stage and people playing songs. And the power of the songs was the power of the concert. … But as a young guy, you’re kind of in this position where this person is allowing me to ask them whatever I want to about music that I love. And it was a blissful time and I still love writing about it.

On his mom’s reluctance to let him tour with rock bands

As a teacher and a counselor who had many great counselees who loved her so much, she always respected intellectualism. So if I could somehow pin it to intellectual success I had a way in. So to go on the road with Led Zeppelin at 15, I had to really sell Led Zeppelin to her as like music that’s based on Tolkien. And this is, like, lofty material that’s good for the soul. And ultimately, I think she said: Because we love the interviewer Dick Cavett in our family, go and take this journey, put on your magic shoes, call me every night, and don’t take drugs.” And that was my ticket out.

On being offered drugs

I learned early on, Terry, that like the best response is no. Because the person offering you the drugs generally then says, “Smart kid, more for me.” And that made me, I don’t know, it made people know that I wasn’t there to join the band, party with the band. I was there with a notebook full of questions based on loving music. And that really swung the door open in many ways.

On interviewing David Bowie in 1976

I asked him at one point, because his real name was David Jones, right? So I asked them at one point, “Am I meeting David Jones or am I meet David Bowie, the creation?” And he said, “You’re meeting David Jones who’s aggressively throwing David Bowie at you.” I asked at one time, I was like, “How do you think you’re gonna die? Do you think you’ll die on stage?” Because Ziggy Stardust, one of his characters, I think was based on somebody who had died on stage. And he said, “No, no no, I don’t think that’s going to happen to me.” I’m paraphrasing a little bit — but he said, “I think my death will be an event, something that I manage and produce and make my own statement.”

Crowe’s new memoir is based on interview tapes from the 1970s, which he saved.

Cameron Crowe/Simon & Schuster

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Cameron Crowe/Simon & Schuster

And that is exactly what happened. … He died of cancer at a young age and he knew he was dying. And what he did was didn’t tell anybody except a small group of collaborators. And he did this album, Black Star, which is his statement about the death that was coming. And it’s profound and it’s managed. And it is an opportunity that he did not throw away. He made a statement about his death.

On how the groupies would confide in him

All of the so-called “groupies,” or people that were hanging around the bands, women in particular, would, because I was so young, would confide in me. So I had no romantic potential or any of that. So they would actually be like magpies with me and just telling me all their stories and like, “I was really upset when he treated me like this” and “blah, blah, but you know what, you move on, you do this.” And I just I was like, wow. Nobody in high school ever talked to me like this. This is a glimpse of romantic bliss, minefields and all kinds of stuff.

On what he learned from Rolling Stone journalist Lester Bangs about being “uncool” — which was portrayed in a scene from Crowe’s semi-autobiographical film, Almost Famous

I was always trying to figure out what cool was, because my mom skipped me too many grades. I got my high school diploma in the mail, because I graduated as a junior. And the attempt to be cool … was never gonna pay off if you’re younger than everybody else. But what Lester was saying was … when you’re posturing, you’re never there. He said that they had done that to music. They had made music a lifestyle posture, not the thing that’s ripped from the soul. …

And I thought, wow, so many of the musicians and the writers and the people that I came to love were not cool. … It was like a lost pursuit, but they found each other through music. They found each through this thing that gave you that feeling of being understood. So I called the book The Uncool because it was the badge of honor that Lester put on me, you know? Don’t try and do it. Be whatever is real to you. And that might be cool.

Sam Briger and Anna Bauman produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.