It’s the 106th birthday of Emil Cioran!

Hello out there, everybody! First and perhaps most important: congratulations. Another instance of that most bewildering and horrendous of human institutions, the dreaded “week,” has passed, and you, you brave and excellent human, have endured it. That’s no small thing.

Here at Melville HQ, we’ve had a week, too, and here were some of the highlights:

• Taylor Sperry kept tabs on the King of Suspense, who has subjected several Trump supporters to imaginatively enhanced interrogation — but fear not, they’re fictional.
• Susan Rella reported on the discovery of history’s earliest-known Shakespeare scholar.
• Why, ’twas only yesterday that Simon Reichley wrote about the fact that Howard Zinn did, in fact, write a number of fiercely beloved books, efforts of the Arkansas House of Representatives notwithstanding.
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  “Spreading Oak” by Allen Butler Talcott, born 150 years ago today.

  Kait Howard has been tracking the efforts of Scott Walker, Wisconsin governor and noted ghoul, to destroy Wisconsin Natural Resources magazine.

• Ryan Harrington kept us up to date on the lawsuit poet Stanely Gebhardt has filed against your friends and ours the Insane Clown Posse, alleging the JJ Boyz stole one of his poems right out of A Second Helping of Chicken Soup for the Soul, where it was anthologized. As though we needed one more reason to compare ICP with jerkwad supreme Neil Gorsuch.
• Nikki Griffiths reported on Marvel Comics’ diversity problem — namely, that they have a problem with diversity.
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  Today would have been the eightieth birthday of Serbian novelist, poet, and painter Momo Kapor

  Julia Fleischaker explained that, while Team Trump may try to hide shameful truths in overwhelming Friday-night document dumps, the people united will never be unable to comb through all those documents.

• Chad Felix considered one book’s unconventional marketing campaign: make the entire thing into gorgeous, retro posters, and plaster the city with ’em. (Sort of the opposite of what some writers have done recently.)
• Ian Dreiblatt wrote about the absurd response to a recent column by Melville House author Rudolph Herzog, proposing the radical idea that Germany should not develop a stockpile of illegal nuclear weapons. Counterpoint: kaboomski?
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  A very happy seventy-fourth birthday to British painter Chris Orr!

  Peter Clark pointed out that, while Amazon has recently acquired the habit of opening brick-and-mortar locations where it is possible to exchange money for books, these are assuredly not bookstores.

• We were also delighted to feature an excerpt from Susan Bordo’s The Destruction of Hillary Clinton. How do we explain the “mind-boggling… contradictions between how millions of us view Hillary and the caricature that dominated the news during the election year”?

There were a couple stories we just didn’t get to:

• Mary Beard, the eminent classicist and author of SPQR, did some great writing at the TLS on the global far right’s unfortunate Latin problem.
• Kruidvat, a Netherlands-based international chain of drugstores, has come under fire for selling a children’s coloring book that features… Adolph Hitler? Seriously, how does that happen?
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  And a happy seventy-third birthday to painter Odd Nerdrum!

  Mark Harmon, a twenty-five-year old inmate in Illinois’s Will County jail, has had books confiscated on the unelaborated grounds that they pose a “security threat.”

• In a sentence that sounds like it came straight out of an episode of Silicon Valley, Shelfie has been bought by Kobo.
• With a quick “¡Adiós!” to their readers, the nearly thirty-year-old Mexican paper Norte has ceased to publish , explaining that distributing the news in Ciudad Juárez, where they’re based, has simply become too dangerous.
• Regnery, a well-known conservative imprint that’s published the likes of Newt Gingrich, Michelle Malkin, and David Horowitz, is reportedly considering picking up Milo Yiannopoulos’s book Dangerous, dropped by Simon & Schuster’s Threshold Editions imprint earlier this year. We’ve been pretty open about the fact that we think this would make them assholes. Stay away, guys.

Today we’re very enthusiastically wishing heroic journalist Seymour Hersh an exorbitantly happy eightieth birthday!

We published one book this week:

We also released this behind-the-scenes video of how we made another:

Finally, it’s Saturday morning and you are owed a cartoon. With springtime fiiiiinally coming, this seems like the one: