Fifty Shades of Grey’s redundant companion novel Grey: Fifty Shades of Grey as Told by Christian (as written by author E. L. James) was released yesterday. Its lead character is mysterious, precocious, spoiled, aloof, hard-headed, deeply affectionate, and a man’s penis. Christian Grey’s sex organ is busier than a termite in a sawmill in the newest chapter of the Fifty Shades saga. Here is an exhaustive catalog of the 39 things that Christian’s cock does and has done to it in this text, as reported by its owner:

This is the paragraph I completed before my mother died:

These days, the New Yorker fiction issue is so bad it’s hard to imagine anyone liking it who wasn’t told to. It wasn’t always this way. Through his “New Yorker short stories,” J.D. Salinger reveals himself to be more than a writer for teens who’ve discarded Ayn Rand and have yet to discover Dostoyevsky. John O’Hara spun his filthy yarns into portraits of middle-class misery. And so on.

From the NBA Finals and the Women’s World Cup to the death of Kalief Browder and the outing of Rachel Dolezal, it has been a roller-coaster week. Oh, and Gawker Media—you know, the company that owns this very website—is, according to Jonathan Mahler and the New York Times, undergoing a “moment of truth.” You don’t say?

To paraphrase the beloved poet and playwright: [inserts five smiling poop emoji]

Earlier this year, two campaigns variously made up of traditionalist sci-fi fans, neoreactionaries, Gamergaters and other flavors of angry white dude hijacked the nominations for one of sci-fi’s most prestigious awards, the Hugo. Now one of the biggest publishers in sci-fi and fantasy seems to have come out in support (or at least appeasement) of those same groups, known as Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies.

Do you love to read? Is summer your favorite time of year? Does reading a good book on the beach or in the park under a bright blue sky bring you limitless joy? Here, the 25 best novels to read during summer.

It’s the first Saturday in June, which means I am headed outside to bask in the halfway-decent weather before NYC converts back to a steel-skied, frozen tundra. But before I go, here are seven stories from the week you missed and should read immediately. As in, right now.

Today, Stephen King’s 55th novel, Finders Keepers, will be published by Scribner. I expect the book will be a bestseller, and King’s name will be in the press even more than usual between its publication and the June 25 premiere of the third season of Under The Dome, a television series based on his novel, and for which he’s an executive producer.

A year after Instagram paparazzi gave us the first look at Jason Segel as David Foster Wallace, here’s the trailer for The End of the Tour, a forthcoming film about the beloved author in the months following the publication of Infinite Jest. Watch it below.

Congrats are in order! Janet Maslin’s annual summer reading list for the New York Times has, at long last, achieved peak caucasity. Maslin’s book selections for summer 2015 all have one glaring fact in common: each author is—wait for it... wait for it—white.

Mat Johnson and I have been friends since we published our first books fifteen years ago. In that time we’ve spent an untold number of hours bullshitting about writing, parenting, and sundry nonsense. Mat’s new novel, Loving Day—which will be released by Spiegel & Grau on May 26—is the story of a mixed-race comic book artist who returns from Wales to his native Philadelphia to discover a daughter he never knew he’d fathered, a mixed-race cult that hopes to recruit him, and a pair of ghosts haunting his father’s home. Our conversation appears below.

Like the hipster phoenix rising from the polychromatic dumpsters overflowing with moldy kale on Williamsburg’s North Side, alt-lit icon (and alleged statutory rapist) Tao Lin has returned with new work. On Monday, the noted author published a short story on Terraform, Vice’s online hub for “future fiction.”

“Literature will lose, sunlight will win, don’t worry.” —Franz Wright, March 18, 1953 - May 14, 2015 [Photo by Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright]

This week, Gawker Review of Books is running interviews with three authors from the world of speculative fiction, discussing their work and their place within the evolving genre. Our final interview is with Daniel José Older, author of the Bone Street Rumba urban fantasy series, which debuted in January with the release of Half-Resurrection Blues.

This week, Gawker Review of Books is running interviews with three authors from the world of speculative fiction, discussing their work and their place within the evolving genre. Today, we’re speaking with Ken Liu, Chinese-American author of the recently released and utterly incredible The Grace of Kings. A former lawyer and computer programmer, Liu is also well-known for translating Liu Cixin’s bold science-fiction novel, The Three-Body Problem, to the masses.

“Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.” —William Zinsser, October 7, 1922 - May 12, 2015 [Photo of the author and Pirates pitching coach Ray Miller in 1989, via]

For a super-genre known for its imagination of radically different worlds and futurescapes, speculative fiction has always been considerably conservative. Spec-fic—an umbrella term encompassing science-fiction, fantasy, horror, alternate history, and some in-between works—has often contrasted fantastic worlds of elves, hobbits, clones, robots, or aliens with a singular binding truth: the genre has mostly exited through the eyes of white men.

This Must Be The Place, the new memoir by Sean H. Doyle—published May 1—features the most gratuitous drug use of any book I’ve ever read, and it’s packed with violence, grief, and generally horrible things. In fact, if you were to take out the drugs and the violence and the sadness, you’d really have nothing. But none of it reads in a way that’s designed to offend the reader. Instead, Doyle seems intent on making himself face his ugliest moments, his lowest points. A dog rubbing his own nose in the many messes he’s made on so many carpets.

There we are, sitting in the middle of a crowd of people in the back of a bookshop. Could be BookCourt, McNally, powerHouse, Housing Works: you know, the good ones. Maybe we’re even at a university. The author has spoken. The moderator has asked his own special questions. Silence has fallen. Now, the gazes of the dudes onstage swing towards us assembled fans like the headlamps on two old Volvos going round a corner. Up go the hands! The moderator chooses a select few, seemingly at random.