“Winter scene” by Isaac van Ostade, baptized 397 years ago today.

It’s June, people! June! We all know what this means: summer is basically happening right now! (Here’s wishing you a shady veranda.) 2018 is 41.9178 percent over, the sky’s falling but hasn’t collapsed, and here we all are, somehow, doing our thing together.

Here on the blog, we’ve closed May out in style:

• Stephanie DeLuca brought us the shortlist for the “Golden” Man Booker — the Man Booker awarded in the category of “best Man Booker winner.” Efforts to celebrate by awarding a blue ribbon to the world’s most artfully frosted can of Pabst Blue Ribbon have been, for now, stymied.
• Tom Clayton let out a breezy “what the hay!” and reported from this year’s Hay Festival, where, despite Germaine Greer insistently saying some truly execrable shit, a great deal of thinking, reading, listening, and overall bookish wonder took place.
• Michael Barron helped us understand why the Trump team met with Russian operatives at Trump Tower in 2016 with a very handy and rather dandy explainer on a vital question: What is the Magnitsky Act?
• Taylor Sperry followed Harvey Weinstein into court, and unpacked the significance of the two books he brought with him.
• Michael Seidlinger invited us for a stroll through the misty graveyard of Philip Roth’s excellent book covers.
• Simon Reichley observed that reading has not made Defense Secretary James Mattis gentle or kind.
• Susan Rella real-time slow-clapped for Yvonne Mason, a former high school English teacher who got a letter from the White House… and decided to correct its abysmally poor grammar. In public. To rapturous applause.
• Alex Primiani has discorporated completely as the result of intense interplanetary meditation. We look forward to her humanoid return on Monday.
• Ryan Harrington sang the ballad of a shocking crime: an accountant at a major Mahattan literary agency has plundered millions of dollars from the firm, many of them owed ultimately to authors. Darin Webb, you are not Pensky material.
• Nikki Griffiths gave us a quick history of WHSmith, recently voted the UK’s worst retailer.
• Ian Dreiblatt speculated with immense restraint into the possible identities of three books recently returned forty years late to the library of the Universty of Nebraska — Omaha.

“Blue Moon” by Nat Mayer Shapiro, born 99 years ago today.

We were also very happy to publish:

• Jonathan Lethem’s movingly intimate, and enjoyably lobster-wasting, reflections on the legacy of Philip Roth, from his indispensable essay collection More Alive and Less Lonely. “As Roth points out, the books aren’t Jewish because they have Jews in them. The books are Jewish in how they won’t shut up or cease contradicting themselves, they’re Jewish in the way they’re sprung both from harangue and from defense against harangue, they’re Jewishly ruminative and provocative.” Hide your cold cuts.
• Another, equally intimate reminiscence from Jacques Berlinerblau, author of Campus Confidential and an editor at the journal Philip Roth Studies. “The paradox is that while Roth seemed to be exposing himself on every page, the author of flesh and blood was inscrutable to outsiders. He was often portrayed as a lonely, Salingeresque recluse. Yet, I remember rummaging through a large box of his personal correspondences in the Library of Congress that suggested otherwise; as far as I can tell, this man was the life of the freakin’ party.”

There were, as ever, some stories we just didn’t get to:

“Small White Pebble Circles,” by England’s Richard Long, celebrating his seventy-third birthday today!

• Libraries! Libraries continue, as always, to be awesome. This week, the torch of bibliotechnical magnificence was passed to the Carnegie-Stout Public Library of Dubuque, Iowa, which has announced a new initiative in which volunteers will hand-deliver books to patrons who cannot leave their homes. Library director (and plainclothes superhero) Susan Henricks hopes to have the program up and running by next month. Volunteers interested in helping out can get it in touch at (563) 589-4225.
• BookExpo! The industry convention formerly known as BEA took place this week in New York, in the cold hell popularly known as the Javits Center. Generally, a great deal happens at the Expo, and an even greater deal doesn’t. One upshot this year was that Macmillan president John Sargent peeled back the curtain, just slightly, to let us know what went down behind the scenes after the presisdent demanded the publisher’s Henry Holt imprint cease production of Michael Wolff’s mega-smash Fire and Fury. “We will not allow any president to achieve by intimidation what our Constitution precludes him or her from achieving in court,” he reportedly said in a memo circulated to staff.
• A weird one, but apparently poet Allen Ginsberg once showed up unannounced at the offices of Robert F. Kennedy, where he swiftly proceeded to ask Kennedy, then a US Senator from New York and former US Attorney General, if he had ever smoked pot. When Kennedy prevaricated, Ginsberg apparently grew angry, replying, “That’s a pretty inhuman answer to give. What kind of a president do you want to be? On the subject of something as spiritual and sweet as pot, if you’re going to sit around giving an IBM-machine answer, that’s not going to satisfy the [younger] generation.” Which is winsome, and amazing.
• The governments of Israel and Myanmar, both of which have PR issues, recently signed an agreement allowing one another to “mutually verify school textbooks, particularly … passages referring to the history of the other state and, where needed, introduce corrections.”
• Maryland is introducing new measures to curtail access to books by inmates in its prisons. The move is reportedly intended to curb the smuggling of drugs inside books — which, as we’ve reported, does in fact happen, wild as it sounds. But there absolutely has to be a better way. The ACLU calls this a “virtual book ban.”

We published one paperback this week:

And finally — it’s Saturday, and cartoons are the only thing that can sweep away the ghosts of the week. We’ve got just the thing. Betty Boop fans, rejoice, and everybody, enjoy the wild stylings of Poor Cinderella:

Take care, keep track of your shoes, and we’ll see you right back here on Monday.