From important new fiction by Jonathan Franzen and Yiyun Li to penetrating critiques of the current political situation by Matt Taibbi and Chris Hedges, there is a lot to look forward to from publishers at all levels for the rest of the summer and the fall.

This selection tries to be wide-ranging and eclectic, focusing as much on the work of independent presses as the major houses, the quieter literary stars as much as the megastars.

It's a good season for translations–look for an exciting new translation of Doctor Zhivago by the acclaimed team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, to finally give Boris Pasternak his due in the English language, and for Susan Bernofsky's translation of the German author Jenny Erpenbeck. There are quiet novels which pack a strong philosophical punch, like Michael Knight's The Typist, as well as the brash, no-holds-barred, whimsical fiction of Gary Shteyngart. Salman Rushdie is following up his earlier fantasy, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, with another fairytale, Luka and the Fire of Life, and V. S. Naipaul, travel writer extraordinaire, gives us a book exploring the roots of African belief. From Manu Joseph we have one of the most exciting recent debut novels, his satire shredding all the illusions of globalization-era India. And Sam Miller tries to do the complex urban spaces of Delhi some justice with his walking tours.

The good–and even great–books are out there in plenty. Tell us in your comments which books you're most anticipating for the remainder of 2010 and why.

In addition to those featured, here are some additional books that should create waves in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction.

Fiction

Charles Yu's How to Live Safely in a Science Fiction Universe (Pantheon, Sept.); Xiaoda Xiao's The Visiting Suit (Two Dollar Radio, Nov.); Jim Powell's The Breaking of Eggs: A Novel (Penguin, July); Salman Rushdie's Luka and the Fire of Life (Random House, Nov.); Cynthia Ozick's Foreign Bodies (Houghton Mifflin, November)–a reimagining of Henry James's The Ambassadors; Dinaw Mengestu's How to Read the Air (Riverhead, Oct.); Barry Hannah's Long, Last, Happy: New & Selected Stories (Grove, Nov.); Ismail Kadare's The Accident: A Novel (Grove, Nov.)–here's an author who richly deserves the Nobel Prize; Mona Simpson's My Hollywood (Knopf, Sept.); Lan Samantha Chang's All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost(Norton, Sept.); Jenny Erpenbeck's Visitation (New Directions, Sept.); Yiyun Li's Gold Boy, Emerald Girl (Random House, Sept.); Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, newly translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Pantheon, Oct.); Michael Knight's The Typist: A Novel (Grove, August); John Reimringer's Vestments (Milkweed, Sept.); and Nadine Gordimer's Life Times: Stories, 1952-2007 (FSG, Nov.).

Poetry

Beckian Fritz Goldberg's Reliquary Fever: New and Selected Poems (New Issues Press, Oct.); Richard Wilbur's Anterooms: New Poems and Translations (Houghton Mifflin, Nov.); Seamus Heaney's Human Chain: Poems (FSG, Sept.); Ai's No Surrender: Poems (Norton, Sept.); Gjertrud Schnackenberg's Heavenly Questions (FSG, Oct.); Major Jackson's Holding Company (Norton, August); Thomas Sayers Ellis's Skin, Inc.: Identity Repair Poems (Graywolf, Aug.); Julie Carr's Sarah–Of Fragments and Lines (Coffee House, Sept.); Steve Healey's Ten Mississippi (Coffee House, Sept.); and Charles Simic's Master of Disguises (Houghton Mifflin, Oct.).

Nonfiction

Gabriel Josipovici's What Ever Happened to Modernism? (Yale University Press, Sept.); Andrew Bacevich's Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War (Metropolitan, Aug.)–following up on his indispensable The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced By War (2006); Robert Reich's Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future (Knopf, Sept.); Tom Grimes's Mentor: A Memoir (Tin House Books, Aug.)–about Grimes's relationship with Frank Conroy, Iowa Writers' Workshop director; R. Tripp Evans's Grant Wood: A Life (Knopf, Oct.); Mark Twain's Autobiography, Vol. 1 (University of California, Nov.)–uncensored, exactly as he left it.

Today, Roku and MP3tunes announced a partnership that will bring your iTunes music library to your television. MP3tunes, for those not familiar, is a company that provides “secure online music space” and features “unlimited listening.” The company’s website boasts, “With just a couple clicks, Locker users can sync their personal digital music and video up to ‘the cloud’ for enjoying from any web browser and a wide variety of mobile and home entertainment devices.” And starting today, you can add the Roku to that list. MP3 offers 10GB of storage for free — ad supported of course — with paid options all the way up to 200 GB. Hit the jump for the full press release. 

MP3tunes and Roku Partner To Bring Personal iTunes Music Collection To TVs

An Industry First: No PC or home server required to play iTunes music libraries on Home Entertainment Systems

San Diego, CA – For the first time, music lovers can play their personal iTunes music collection on their TV without a home server. Roku, the market leader in streaming entertainment devices has added expanded support for personal music collections with the addition of MP3tunes. Available now on all Roku players, the MP3tunes channel connects securely to a customer’s personal music stored online in their MP3tunes Locker. After a few simple steps to connect and sync music to a web-based locker, any Roku becomes a rich music player.

“Now customers can get their music library to their TV without the complexity or cost of a home server,” said Michael Robertson, CEO of MP3tunes. “For less than $100, iTunes users or any music enthusiast can turn a TV into a home stereo and take advantage of the best speakers in their house.”

Roku customers can find the free MP3tunes channel in the Roku channel store. By adding this channel to their Roku, customers can access their song libraries and playlists which have historically been available only on their PC in iTunes or portable players which they sync. The MP3tunes channel defaults to a one-click shuffle mode, which immediately plays a random mix of music along with a visual display of accompanying cover art. Customers may choose to browse their music and select artists, albums or playlists to hear.

All Roku customers receive 10GB of free storage space for their music which, on average, will store music libraries up to 2,500 songs. Additional storage for larger music collections is available with MP3tunes premium locker accounts up to 200GBs. For a limited time, customers may also buy a Roku player with a $20 discount and get a free MP3tunes Premium Locker. See www.mp3tunes.com/rokubundle for more information.

“Roku customers are increasingly taking advantage of streaming music services, and now with MP3tunes we are giving them access to their full iTunes music library right on the TV,” said Jim Funk, vice president of business development for Roku, Inc. “In addition to being a terrific video player with support for Netflix, Amazon Video on Demand, and a whole host of other great sports and entertainment content, the Roku player is also a gateway to rich audio entertainment thanks to MP3tunes.”

By choosing Roku as its first launch partner in the home entertainment category, MP3tunes joins major streaming services like Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX), Amazon Video On Demand (Nasdaq: AMZN), MLB.TV, and the Ultimate Fighting Championship®. The Roku digital video player joins a growing family of devices that play music from a secure MP3tunes locker including Apple iPhone, iTouch, Google Android and Logitech radios. MP3tunes’ unique open music API (www.mp3tunes.com/api) allows any net aware device for car, home, mobile to play a personal music collection.

A video tour of the service can be viewed at: http://www.youtube.com/user/mp3tunes#p/u/6/ctn4Dx0IGPE

Read

Tags: Audio, itunes, Media, mp3, MP3tunes, music, roku, streaming

Thanks to an update to the service's native Android app, users can now, for example, buy a song using their Android phone and listen to that song on an iPod touch or Logitech Squeezebox within minutes. Similarly, iTunes users can download songs on their PCs and then play the music back on their Android phones or through MP3tunes' web interface. Sadly, Airband, the MP3tunes iOS app, hasn't been updated to take advantage of Apple's new multitasking features yet.

For a closer look at MP3tunes, also see our in-depth review of the service from earlier this year. MP3tunes currently offers all of its users free 2GB music lockers, but the company is in the process of upgrading all of these accounts to 10GB of free storage. For $4.95 per month, users can also expand their lockers to 50GB.

Competitors: Other Music Lockers and Streaming Music Services

Apple is rumored to be launching an online version of iTunes in the near future, though the chances that Apple will offer users the ability to wirelessly sync this music with an Android phone are rather slim. Other MP3tunes competitors include MeCanto, which offers streaming to Android and Symbian phones, and pSonar, which offers unlimited storage but doesn't offer mobile streaming or downloads.

In addition, the growing popularity of streaming music services like MOG and Rdio also poses a number of challenges for music locker services like MP3tunes. Some of these – like Rdio – already scan their users' library for music that is also available on their services and then make these songs easily available on their services without forcing users to upload their complete music library. This was one of the features that made Lala so popular, though it remains to be seen if Apple plans to offer a similar service once it relaunches Lala.

The Most Obsequious Blurb Ever to Grace a Book Cover

Behold, the blurb that launched a thousand mocking blog posts: “Very rarely, a few times in a lifetime, you open a book and when you close it nothing can ever be the same…” Book blurbs: Old media's version of linkbaiting.

The Guardian's book blog is having a contest to out-praise History of Love writer Nicole Krauss (and wife of author Jonathan Safran Foer), who wrote this blurb for novelist David Grossman's new book:

Very rarely, a few times in a lifetime, you open a book and when you close it again nothing can ever be the same. Walls have been pulled down, barriers broken, a dimension of feeling, of existence itself, has opened in you that was not there before. To the End of the Land is a book of this magnitude. David Grossman may be the most gifted writer I've ever read; gifted not just because of his imagination, his energy, his originality, but because he has access to the unutterable, because he can look inside a person and discover the unique essence of her humanity. For twenty-six years he has been writing novels about what it means to defend this essence, this unique light, against a world designed to extinguish it. “To the End of the Land” is his most powerful, shattering, and unflinching story of this defense. To read it is to have yourself taken apart, undone, touched at the place of your own essence; it is to be turned back, as if after a long absence, into a human being.

Which, wow. I sort of want to read it now? But this is the wrong reaction, Salon's Laura Miller tells us in a column explaining why all book blurbs are bullshit:

Once a reasonably finished draft of a manuscript has been completed, the author, at his publisher's insistence, begins the grueling and humiliating process of begging blurbs from better-known writers. So when publishing people look at the lineup of testimonials on the back of a new hardcover, they don't see hints as to what the book they're holding might be like. Instead, they see evidence of who the author knows, the influence of his or her agent, and which MFA program in creative writing he or she attended. In other words, blurbs are a product of all the stuff people claim to hate about publishing: its cliquishness and insularity.

Miller goes on to list faint praise code words (“sweet” means the blurber secretly hated the book) and other open secrets from the publishing industry. She concludes that the “62 percent of book buyers choose titles on the basis of blurbs” need to stop doing that, so the saccharine menace that is the economy of blurbs may finally be expunged. But without blurbs, where would well-connected writers rehearse the fine art of hyperbole? It's like a writing workshop exercise: Can you out-praise a fifth grader on a sugar high? It's the old media version of link baiting—which is, by the way, harder than it looks. Do you know how long it took me to write a sufficiently hyperbolic headline for this post? So long. Longer than the Wall of China, longer than the longest wait at the boringest DMV you've even been to, longer even than the longest continuous filament doubled over and knotted upon itself many times in the World's Largest Ball of Twine in Darwin, Minnesota. Really long, y'all. [Guardian, Salon]

Send an email to Maureen O'Connor, the author of this post, at maureen@gawker.com.

There have been spurts of rumors about the potential for, say, a 3G MacBook Air, but nothing came of them, and that particular market niche would appear to now be amply covered by the iPad 3G.

Disinterest From Apple

However, MacBook Air fans shouldn’t give up hope just yet. Earlier this month the Mac mini got a major refresh and new lease on life after a long stretch of apparent disinterest from Apple.

I have no inside knowledge, but what I suspect is that Apple wanted to wait and see what sort of market reception the iPad achieved before committing to a MacBook Air upgrade. Of course, the fact that the iPad has been an out-of-the-park home run in sales performance probably hasn’t enhanced the Air’s prospects for survival, but it’s more complicated than that.

For one thing, the two machines occupy widely divergent points on the price spectrum, and in that context don’t compete directly with each other, although it is entirely conceivable that some users who might otherwise have purchased a MacBook Air will now get an iPad to serve as a light, handy, mobile computing device. I expect more than a few will be of that persuasion, bleeding potential sales from an already limited MacBook Air market.

A “Real” Computer

On the other hand, a sizable cohort of users will still want a “real” ultralight laptop computer with a proper keyboard, a trackpad and stand-up display that can run full-fledged Mac OS X production application software. Despite its virtues, which are many, the iPad meets none of those criteria.

Personally, I’ve resisted the 3-pound, 0.76-inch thick MacBook Air mainly on price, but have also objected to its constrained expandability and connectivity. However, compared with the iPad, which hasn’t even a single real USB port to its name, the Air is almost a power-user machine.

One of the MacBook Air’s problems is that it’s always been arbitrarily positioned and priced as something of a carriage trade accessory and arm candy for well-heeled users, rather than as a serious work tool. In terms of practical capability, the 13-inch MacBook Pro has pretty much all of the same bases covered, aside from extreme thinness and light weight, and in a package that’s not grossly thicker, heavier, or larger in footprint, and which manages to look really great doing it while selling at a relatively bargain basement price. Willingness to carry around an extra 1.5 pounds to get the MacBook Pro’s superior performance is a subjective value judgment and benefit trade-off. These things are relative; the MacBook Air weighs twice as much as an iPad.

Get a MacBook and iPad Both for the Price of a MacBook Air

Another way to look at it is that you can buy a white, entry-level MacBook and a base model iPad for exactly the same money as the base MacBook Air, and essentially have your cake and eat it, too, at no greater cost.

Yet another possible stumbling block in the MacBook Air’s upgrade path is Apple’s CPU vs. GPU dilemma. The current Air has, as noted above, Core 2 Duo processor silicon paired with NVIDIA 9600M integrated graphics processing — both categories being previous-generation hardware. Apple chose to stick with Core 2 Duo for the 13-inch MacBook and MacBook Pro so they could use NVIDIA’s new and much faster 320M integrated GPU, which I think was a good and sensible decision for now. But for an ultraportable machine like the MacBook Air, raw graphics performance is not a first-priority attribute. Few users are likely to be doing high-end graphics, video editing or serious gaming on an Air.

Core i3 Power?

Consequently, Intel’s new low-power consumption Core i3 CPU with its own, in-house HD Graphics GPU and Hyper-Threading technology, which enables each processor core to address two tasks at the same time, might arguably be a more sensible alternative. That would make the Air the only Apple system using Core i3 silicon, which is offered in clock speeds ranging from 1.20 GHz to 2.40 GHz, but presumably it won’t be sticking with Core 2 Duo for the 13-inch MacBooks forever, so it could serve as a relatively low–volume engineering trial.

It would help if Intel could relent and license NVIDIA to make graphics chipsets for core CPUs, but odds of that happening are difficult to gauge.

With the iPad’s spectacular sales success, I have to say I’m skeptical about the MacBook Air having a very auspicious future. However, Apple has surprised us before, and it could again. If you really want a MacBook Air, my best guess is that it might be prudent make your move now while they’re still available, but don’t be mad at me if you do and Apple springs a new Air on us.

Who now?

Lieberman made an unwanted cameo on the public stage during the Clinton years, when she became briefly famous as the White House staff member who tried to shoo Monica Lewinsky away from Bill Clinton after she noticed that the intern seemed to be “spending too much time around the West Wing.”

Okay, and how well did Lieberman do?

Lieberman ostentatiously failed in that mission.

OH, WELL, GREAT. Why is it that of all the “White House observers” in the world, Politico only seems to know the ones that are thundering dipshits?

If such bare-chested behavior had occurred in the West Wing, “Evelyn would have said the same thing she'd say to women in the White House whose skirts were too short,” said Jennifer Palmieri, a deputy White House press secretary during the Clinton years. “She would say, 'Excuse me, I think you forgot your skirt.' In this case she would say, 'Excuse me, I believe you forgot your shirt.'” However, Palmieri said even White House aides get a longer leash for what happens in a bar on a weekend afternoon.

AND THAT IS WHEN I CLICKED “CLOSE TAB.” I mean, that is one whole page of nothing but meandering equivocation and nonsense. (It goes on, into the wasteland of lost time, for two more pages).

Inexplicably, it took two writers to produce an article this pointless. And one of them is editor-in-chief John F. Harris! Meanwhile, Politico's gossip site, Click, has an article up on a documentary film about redistricting. It's like two universes have just swapped places.

Anyway, this is why there is a section in my living will that reads, “Any perceived willingness to work for Politico should be treated as de facto evidence of brain death; do not resuscitate.”

UPDATE: Jed Lewison bravely kept the tab open, and finds, on the third page of this dreck: “Contrary to the original reports, the group was not playing beer pong. And their shirts were off because the group had gotten caught in a rainstorm before repairing to Old Glory in Georgetown.” I regret inadvertently going easy on John F. Harris, who really is a complete numbskull.

[Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not? Also, please send tips to tv@huffingtonpost.com -- learn more about our media monitoring project here.]

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Earlier this week, GoogleGoogle posted a brand new addition to its Search Stories collection, this time for the upcoming Disney/Pixar film Toy Story 3. This is the latest in a long list of digital marketing endeavors for the film that have utilized FacebookFacebook, YouTubeYouTube and other social networks to spread the word about the film to a broad demographic of potential moviegoers.

Google first debuted its Search Stories series in its Super Bowl ad and the motif has since been carried on in spots created by Google and other brands and individuals using Google’s Search Stories Video Creator.

While brands like Sesame Street have released their own Search Stories videos, the Toy Story 3 spot goes one step further in its use of both Randy Newman’s score as well as the voices of the Toy Story toys (performed by actors like Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Wallace Shawn and Don Rickles).

Previously, Disney/Pixar used YouTube in the creation of faux-vintage toy commercials for some of the new characters in the next film. The studio has also utilized Facebook to ignite student interest in the film and to sell movie tickets directly on its Facebook Page.

Toy Story 3 opens up internationally next week and is expected to be a big hit.

[via AMC Entertainment]

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Looks like Disrupt is going great! Congrats on putting on the event. No small task for sure. I know all of the startups really appreciate the venue you've created to help them succeed and get the word out.

But guys…MovieClips? An affiliate link to go buy the movie on Amazon/iTunes/Fandango. I must be missing something with their business model. It's sweet technology, but what problem are they solving? Is this making the marketplace better? How's this disruptive? Sharing movie clips is their answer to the biggest trend (piracy) of the decade? I smell varmint poontang…

We spent a lot of time, energy and effort to pitch you Vidli. We must have done a poor job in our phone interview with Heather. Good news though – things worked out. We're not ready yet to pitch Vidli on big stage under the bright lights quite yet.

I know you have a lot going on but I felt like this might be a helpful tidbit for future events. Next time, the professional courtesy of a follow up to let us know we weren't selected would be appreciated. I know that's not too much to ask. Karma is notorious for coming back to you on things like that. I know first hand from not responding to people in job interviews after reviewing hundreds of resumes. It didn't seem like there was enough time, so I didn't. Suffice to say, I always do now…

Either way, hope the conference goes well. Vidli and the blue-footed Boobies are pulling for MovieClips Yippee-ki-yay!

Macworld:

A huge number of people think they might write a book some day–back in 2002, a survey pegged it at 81 percent of Americans. But what happens after you've managed to pen your 200,000 word epic on love and loss in feudal Europe–with vampires, naturally–but still can't get a bite from a publisher?

Read the whole story: Macworld

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Heat Vision posits that this has a great deal to do with the fact that Geoff Johns is now the chief creative officer at DC Entertainment. Johns was responsible for the 2009 series The Flash: Rebirth. It is believed that the new Flash film would be based on the Barry Allen incarnation of The Flash (also the one that Johns uses). Since Allen and Hal Jordan (AKA The Green Lantern) are known to be friends in the comics, the potential for crossover could be significant. Thus, if Green Lantern is a hit in the way that Warners is hoping, it could be the start of more than one franchise.

Now Writers Can Submit Books to the iBookstore

As previously teased, writers can now submit their own books to iBookstore. I can't wait to submit my Jane Austen fan fiction! And neither can Mr. Jean-Luc PicDarcy [iTunes Connect via MacLife]

Send an email to Mark Wilson, the author of this post, at mark@gizmodo.com.

The New Yorker has created a list of 20 writers under 40 worth watching. You probably hate it already, without even knowing who's on it. But how can you complain about it, without looking jealous and bitter?

So: The New Yorker's 20 under 40. Has your mother called you yet, to ask why you're not on it? (“It's very political, mom.”) This is a list, in case you couldn't tell, of fiction writers who were all born more recently than 1970. It is very important to the 300 people who still read fiction, because that's what lists do: Tell you what is important.

This is how it came about: Sometime last year, Eustace Tilley and the fiction editors holed up in New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman's house, talking about “books” and “writing” and listening to Hounds of Love on repeat, playing Russian Roulette till dawn and watching publishers and agents dance, naked, begging Lady Treisman to put their authors on her devil's list. (Okay, actually, they just had a couple meetings back in January and looked up some birthdays and chose 20 writers, eight of whom will be published in an upcoming “fiction” special; the other 12 in subsequent issues of the magazine.)

Anyway. The list has been given to The New York Times. And it definitely has 20 authors on it! Are you ready? Are you just, like, totally pumped? Here are the greatest 20 authors to have never turned 40 years old:

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• Chris Adrian
• Daniel Alarcón
• David Bezmozgis
• Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
• Joshua Ferris
• Jonathan Safran Foer
• Nell Freudenberger
• Rivka Galchen
• Nicole Krauss
• Yiyun Li
• Dinaw Mengestu
• Philipp Meyer
• C. E. Morgan
• Téa Obreht
• Z Z Packer
• Karen Russell
• Salvatore Scibona
• Gary Shteyngart
• Wells Tower

Hey, so, it's not a bad list. Rivka Galchen is great! But if you're an author under 40, you can't admit that! You aren't on the list, and therefore, the list sucks. The thing is, you don't want to sound bitter when you complain about it to your Tumblr followers/barber/kidnap victim. The key is to be as dismissive as possible. Here are some guidelines:

DON'T pick on specific writers who you hate.
DO pretend you don't even read new fiction.
Sample: “Jonathan Safran Foer? He's a writer, you say? Hmm. I'll definitely check him out, when I finish rereading Box Man.”

DON'T accuse the magazine of favoritism or “affirmative action.”
DO make up authors and wonder vaguely why they're not on the list.
Sample: “That's odd—I was sure Suzanne Jeffersontonian would be here. Oh well.”

DON'T claim that you could come up with a better group of writers
DO act skeptical about the concept of “lists.”
Sample: “So these are, what, the best writers under 40? Huh.”

DON'T spend more than 200 words or five minutes talking about it.
DO use the phrase “for what it is” as much as possible.
Sample: For what it is, this is great! For what it is.

DON'T call it “unsurprising” or “boring.”
DO pretend you didn't even know about the list.
Sample: “Oh, The New Yorker? It's a magazine, right? They publish fiction?”

And don't worry! I'm sure you'll make it next time. Unless you're over 40, in which case, sorry.

[NYT; pic, of editor-in-chief David Remnick, via Getty]

Send an email to Max Read, the author of this post, at max@gawker.com.

Arrogant bastards like me love this kind of stuff and it’s what makes me like to read Think Progress so much: they…