Apple was charged with colluding with publishers to fix e-book prices. At the root of the dispute lie two different ways that publishers can sell books to retailers.

First, there's the wholesale model, the way that book publishers have sold printed books to bookstores and other outlets for years. The publisher sets a cover price for a book, sells it to a retailer at a discount (typically 50 percent) and then the retailer can sell the book to consumers for whatever price it chooses.

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In this particular scenario, I was being introduced to Philip Roth, my mother’s favorite writer, whom I had heard her refer to as “the literary lion.” And while I’ve never been particularly starstruck, I flipped when I found out Roth was going to be there. Next thing I know, a mutual friend takes me by the hand, drags me over to Roth, and introduces me to him in this fashion: “Philip. Zis is Periel, she is a grrrreat writer.”

I could not imagine anything more humiliating in the entire world. I wanted to curl up in a hole and die. Adding insult to injury, a friend of Roth’s who was lingering around us, nodded toward Roth and said to me, “So you like him, huh?”

In attempt to salvage whatever miserly bit of self-respect I had left, I said, “Well, I don’t know him, so I can’t like him, but I do like his work.”

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What many true crime aficionados would regard as the most important element of the crimes -- the identity of the perpetrator -- is the one piece of information Kolker, along with everybody else investigating the killings, cannot supply. Surely a few readers of "Lost Girls" will find this unsatisfying, but that will be their shortcoming, not Kolker's. The absence of the killer is the making of this book, a constraint that allows it to become extraordinary.

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Instead of feeling melancholy about the life she was leaving behind, Mare was brimming with excitement. The Beast, Len’s old green Chevy, was loaded down with their belongings and ready to carry them north. Six years earlier, Mare had arrived in San Francisco with her new husband, Gene. When her marriage fell apart a year later, she fled to the Haight-Ashbury. What a refuge the Haight had been. The neighborhood was brimming with creativity and hope. The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, and Jefferson Airplane all called it home. The Diggers served free soup down the Panhandle from Mare’s apartment. The Haight was famous the world over. During that summer they called Love, even more dreamers flocked to San Francisco. There was such a spirit of freedom and communalism to the place that, for a moment, Mare really believed love could conquer all.

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The  shaking started  around three in the morning, and it happened that I was already awake because I’d nursed Owen at two and then, instead of going back to sleep, I’d lain there brooding about the fight I’d had at lunch with my sister, Vi. I’d driven with Owen and Rosie in the backseat to pick up Vi, and the four of us had gone to Hacienda. We’d finished eating and I was collecting Rosie’s  stray food from the tabletop—once I had imagined I wouldn’t be the kind of mother who ordered chicken tenders for her child off the menu at a Mexican restaurant—when Vi said, “So I have a date tomorrow.”

“That’s great,” I said. “Who is it?”

Casually, after running the tip of her tongue over her top teeth to check for food, Vi said, “She’s an IT consultant, which sounds boring, but she’s traveled a lot in South and Central America, so she couldn’t be a total snooze, right?”

I was being baited, but I tried to match Vi’s casual tone as I said, “Did you meet online?” Rosie, who was two and a half, had gotten up from the table, wandered over to a ficus plant in the corner, and was smelling the leaves. Beside me in the booth, buckled into his car seat, Owen, who was six months, grabbed at a little plush giraffe that hung from the car seat’s handle.

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Julio Cortázar has left even bolder suggestions for readers of his experimental novel Hopscotch, published 50 years ago today, June 28. He invites them to start the novel at chapter 73 and then proceed through the novel’s 155 sections in a prescribed order — Cortázar gives a list of the alternative sequence in his “Table of Instructions” — leaping back and forth in the book, until they finally finish, having already read 132 through 155, with chapter 131. To make matters more interesting, he asks readers to skip chapter 55 completely (I will admit I cheated and read it anyway), and to read one of the chapters twice.

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Sears, J.C. Penney, Walgreens, Wal-Mart, Target, Home Depot, Novo Nordisk, Smithfield Foods, Caesars Entertainment and The Food Network have all parted ways with the disgraced celebrity chef as well.

On the bright side, Deen might be going on more cruises this year.

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For the first time since I’d entered the ministry, I settled in my mind that the spiritual fix I sought in order to return to preaching was unlikely to be found. I was going to have to live my life without a spiritual resolution. I needed to face the cold fact that I would not be back behind the pulpit anytime soon. Preaching at a somewhat traditional Pentecostal church was going to be impossible and I’d even been unable to make the liberal Pentecostalism of Grace of DeQuincy or First Community work for me. But I could not completely let go of the ministry: I had been ministering for nearly twenty-five years and from the very beginning it was not a career but a mission. Perhaps, I reasoned to myself then, I’ll find a mentor in the church and quietly work under him—or maybe I’ll pastor to the faithful individually. But as the spring of 2011 began, I had to push my spiritual crisis even further back into my mind. I was just emerging from the training period with Ronnie, which meant that I’d soon assume real responsibilities at BIG. The promotion would be a big boost to Kelli and me financially as we were just beginning to rebuild from the near financial collapse of my Village Profile period. With a happy, contented wife and a boss who treated me as both a business partner and a brother, life was good again. I couldn’t allow my questions of faith to consume me.

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But 7/22 did happen. It was truly horrible, and the American people were understandably scared and angry. 7/22 opened a door, and Sarah Palin walked through it.

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Books are heavy. They're bulky. When you finish one, it's suddenly useless, and you have to carry it around for the rest of the day, or the rest of your vacation. When you move, it's one more bricklike object driving up the cost. Move two of seven for me was a cross-country one, and shipping a dozen boxes of books to my new address cost hundreds of dollars. Then I had to cantilever each box down the stairs to my basement apartment using a rolling backpack. After that I've never forgotten how quickly an entertaining read becomes a millstone.

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"I'm in favor of ending the possibility of offering both free delivery and a five percent discount," she told BFM news television on Friday. "We need a law, so we're going to find a legislative window to introduce one."

Amazon in France declined to comment.

Filippetti's remark underscored tensions between the French government and U.S. online firms such as Amazon and Google, which have been criticized for paying too little to the creators of cultural or news content.

France, like other European countries, bans retailers from discounting books more than 5 percent from a sale price set by the publisher. This is to prevent small sellers from being crushed by giant retailers that can absorb bigger discounts.

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But his words were poetry made prose, with that talent for adding just enough of the alien to render the familiar world magnificent and awe-inspiring. His science fiction tiptoed just on the edge of the world we lived in every day, making it crackle with a connection to reality that was beyond the grasp of many of his more famous contemporaries who wrote so much further beyond the ken of the mundane. Stephen King has said that Matheson was the single largest influence on his writing.

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Rice, the "Interview with a Vampire" and "Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt" author, took to Facebook on Friday to ask whether it's "fair" that the media has roasted the star for her overt racism. As a writer who is (presumably) precise with her diction, Rice's defense of Deen may be the most offensive one, yet: Her note draws disturbing parallels between Deen and martyrdom, calling the public outcry a "crucifixion" against Deen. Rice then displays an appalling lack of racial sensitivity and calls the uproar a sign of "a lynch mob culture," alluding to the very violent lynchings of blacks in antebellum and Jim Crow south:

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A spokesman for the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films says Matheson died Sunday in Los Angeles. No other details were provided.

Several of Matheson’s works were adapted into movies, including “Hell House” and “What Dreams May Come.”

Matheson was also responsible for writing several episodes of “The Twilight Zone.” His installments included “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” which featured William Shatner as an airplane passenger who spots a creature on the plane’s wing.

Matheson’s sci-fi vampire novel “I Am Legend” inspired three film adaptations: 1964′s “The Last Man on Earth,” 1971′s “Omega Man” and 2007′s “I Am Legend.”

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Without summarizing the plot in any way, what would you say your novel is about?

Sarah Bruni: The Midwest. Spider-Man. Identity-borrowing. Adolescence.  Fugitives falling in love. Formative acts of reading.

Alissa Nutting: Sex. Obsession. Monstrosity. Gender roles.

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Like Alan Zweibel and Lorne Michaels, Hughes had slogged as a gag writer in his youth, selling jokes to the likes of Rodney Dangerfield, Joan Rivers and Phyllis Diller. Like Chris Miller, he had been a copywriter and became an agency vice president by the time he was twenty-five while freelancing for Playboy. In fact, it was Miller’s work that had inspired Hughes to contact the Lampoon. “I read all of Chris Miller’s stuff and a couple of things by Doug Kenney and the stuff drove me insane,” he recalled, and in late 1977, he called and ended up talking to cartoonist Shary Flenniken, who told him to get in touch with Tony Hendra, at that point incubating his own satire magazine. But the socialist-leaning, literary Hendra and the basically apolitical-though-Republican-if-anything Hughes (who would make his name in 1985 as writer and director of "The Breakfast Club," a movie in which five high school kids are confined to a library and generally avoid reading, bored stiff though they are) were not a good fit.

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"Hamlet" is the play that really brings out this urge, given that its title character is mysteriously inhibited from doing the thing that he regards as his greatest responsibility. Why doesn't the prince kill his uncle, when he believes (or does he?) that Claudius has killed his father? Why does he instead dither and rave and philosophize and brood and berate both his (innocent) girlfriend and his (culpable?) mother? How does he manage to kill someone else's father and engineer the deaths of two of his uncle's hirelings without getting around to the main event until the very last minute, when his own life is forfeit?

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Who is John Galt?

John Galt (as written in said novel) is a deeply flawed, sociopathic ideal of the perfect human. John Galt does not recognize the societal structure surrounding him that allows him to exist. John Galt, to be frank, is a turd.

However, John Galt is also very close to greatness. The only thing he is missing, the only thing Ayn Rand forgot to take into account when writing "Atlas Shrugged," is empathy.

John Galt talks about intelligence and education without discussing who will pay for the schools, who will teach the teachers. John Galt has no thought for his children, or their children, or what kind of world they will have to occupy when the mines run out and the streams dry up. John Galt expects an army to protect him but has no concern about how it’s funded or staffed. John Galt spends his time in a valley where no disasters occur, no accidents happen, and no real life takes place.

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