​"The Great Gatsby was updated in 1924. You don't need it to be refreshed, do you?"

He's got a point there, does Jonathan Franzen, one of America's most important essayists and novelists, whose works include the much acclaimed Freedom and The Corrections. E-books, like Amazon's Kindle, he says, are forging a world where instant gratification trumps any sense of permanence and unalterability.

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​Reporter Tony Hopfinger got especially lucky after leaving Seattle Weekly a few years back. He not only landed in Alaska, where oil man Bill Allen was busy corrupting ancient Sen. Ted Stevens and helping pave the way for the rise of Gov. Sara Palin (and, in turn, Tina Fey), he got arrested.

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​Not to be outdone by her former beau's book deal, emancipated murder suspect Amanda Knox has inked her own deal--hers with an agent who has helped usher in books from some of the most famous people in the world.

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Phoenix Jones/Ben Fodor

​Jon Ronson profiled Phoenix Jones' for GQ earlier this year, and has now expanded that feature into an E-Book that portrays the self-proclaimed superhero as a total badass...and also a bit of an ass.

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​If the allegations are true, then no decent person should buy anything from child-raping former Penn State football defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky. That, however, doesn't mean people should go around banning his book.

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​Nothing wards off the dozing effects of tryptophan better than a little detective work on America's most famous unsolved heist. Proving this fact, detectives, journalists and fans from all over the country will be spending their Thanksgiving weekend in Portland, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the "D.B. Cooper" hijacking.

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​For a few thousand fans of independently-published books about zombies, Christmas came early this year. That's because author James Crawford's book Blood Soaked & Contagious was recently reduced from $5.99 to free.

More than 6,000 people downloaded the free flesh-eater book. The only problem is that Crawford never wanted the book to be free. And Amazon, even though the error in pricing was theirs, is refusing to give the scribe a red cent for any of the books the company gave away.

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​Back in the day, Domingo Martinez was a funny, witty colleague at Seattle Weekly, but one who didn't actually write for the paper. Instead, he worked in the production department, designing ads, but also occasionally helping those of us in editorial with Spanish translations and slang. My imperfect recollection is that I assigned him a few short calendar items to write, but they appear to be lost to the Web. But since leaving SW a few years back, Domingo has applied himself to memoir writing, recounting his '80s boyhood in Brownsville, Texas, and the subsequent life journey that brought him to Seattle. Now his talent has come to fruit: His first book, The Boy Kings of Texas: A Memoir, will be published next summer. And he'll be on public radio this weekend...

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My Zune sounds like rainbows taste!

​Bill Gates' problem, you see, is that he needs to open up, man; explore the Windows of the mind.

With a little less "shamelessly ripp[ing] off other people's ideas" and a little more LSD, Gates could be as cool as Steve Jobs was.

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​Dr. Mary Ellen O'Toole spent 14 years of her 28-year career with the FBI getting inside the heads of criminals through her work as a profiler. Her book Dangerous Instincts: How Gut Feelings Betray Us examines how appearances, instincts and preconceived notions can get in the way of finding the truth.

She tells Seattle Weekly that the murder trial of Amanda Knox is a case in point of this phenomenon.

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