Tag: 03.02.00

David Talbot’s Salon Magazine gave a first-class coming-out party last week to celebrate their arrival in the capital. The dynamic: out-of-towner meets the locals and each sizes up the other. “It was, as the organizers had intended, as if an issue of Salon had jumped off the web and the bylines had leapt to life. More heat than light, but provoking an intensity of concentration among the audience unusual in a capital more accustomed to droning speakers and one-sided think-tank snooze-fests familiar to the C-Span viewing public.” – The Idler

• “David Talbot loves to tout Salon as cutting-edge, risk-taking, and irreverent,” writes Baltimore’s City Paper, “but the panel discussion he hosted that evening was nothing more than four self-promoting pundits (Arianna Huffington, David Horowitz, Joe Conason, and Stanley Crouch) trotting out what sounded like outtakes from Crossfire.” – Baltimore City Paper

The Turkish government confiscated all available copies of Jonathan Ames’ novel The Extra Man last week, and will try both his translator, Fatih Ozguven, and his publisher in Istanbul, Iletisim, on charges that the book is “corrupt and harmful to the morality of Turkish readers,” according to a fax Ames’ international rights agent Rosalie Siegel received from Istanbul. The book had been out a few months, and had been submitted to government censors for approval before publishing, as is required in Turkey. – New York Press