Book News, In Brief

James Frey has a new book, and this time he's admitting it's fiction. All of you crybaby bi**hes who loved A Million Little Pieces until you found out it was fake oughtta be the first ones in line for this one. After all, you were clearly impressed with his prose. Oh, but you say that you're the sort of reader that can only enjoy a book about suffering, effed up junkies when you think that the effed up junkies were really suffering, right? Yikes. Remind me to keep you away from small children and defenseless animals.

Via the generically titled, Daily News Tribune: "Leah Bruosta’s fifth-grade class knows the ins and outs of running a magazine. Over the last few months, Bruosta’s class at MacArthur Elementary School met with student authors, reviewed material and crammed to meet the deadline for the recently published school literary magazine, The MacArthur MacAuthors."

While one has to commend Bruosta for coming up with such a cool project for her students, one also has to admit that a literary magazine is about as relevant to today's world as a steam engine railroad car. (Editor's Note: Or a less-than-literary, literature-themed blog.)

There was a time when MAD Magazine was one of the sharpest, funniest, most subversive works of satire on the news stand. It was SPY magazine for kids, and The New Yorker for Jersey residents. Hell, even Alan Moore credits it as being one of the foremost influences on his writing. Unfortunately, for the past few decades, Mad Magazine has been little more than a weak pastiche of pop culture parodies and fart jokes. But could all of that be changing? Yesterday's NYTimes spilled the beans on MAD's hiring of ten Pulitzer Prize winning political cartoonists to illustrate "Why George W. Bush Is in Favor of Global Warming." I guess we'll have to wait until next Sunday's paper to see if MAD has got The Daily Show's writers scripting their Cloverfield lampoon.

(Click here for a slideshow of MAD Magazine's global warming cartoons.)