How to Be: North Dakota – A Guide to the Plains is out now (and psst, costs only $8.95). The book, which features illustrations by Amy Jean Porter, would make a great holiday gift for anyone "who has looked at the vast expanse of Ole and Lena jokes and asked, 'Is that it?'" READ MORE

This excerpt comes from Diana Balmori's A Landscape Manifesto. Balmori Associates, her landscape and urban design firm, recently completed a nine-mile linear park on the abandoned New Haven railroad in Connecticut. READ MORE

This essay appears in Deliriously Happy: and Other Bad Thoughts, out this week. READ MORE

Dignity, a new book by Ken Layne, is a novel composed of found letters, set in the post-housing crisis California wasteland, when people must learn again how to make food. READ MORE

NEW YORK CITY, 1979. If Maria, as she entered her second year at Juilliard, rarely had the sense that her move to New York was a dream from which at any moment she might be shaken awake, she continued to have doubts. Linda, for one, seemed so much happier than she was, and the same could be said of many of the other students, who while clearly devoted to their practice regimens, managed to find time for friendship and dating in a way that still felt largely beyond her. As often as she craved having more friends or—a much keener desire—a boyfriend, the singer in her would belittle such wants or needs as childish or irrelevant, or at best subordinate to the more important ones dictated by her art. READ MORE

In the spring of 1925, a 16-year-old Jackson, Mississippi, schoolboy named Richard Wright wrote his first story. He took it to the new black paper in town, the Southern Register, showing it to the editor, Malcolm Rogers, who promptly published it. Shortly thereafter, Wright, who worked as a local paperboy for the Chicago Defender, graduated from eighth grade at Smith Robertson Elementary School as valedictorian. He would go on to attend the new local black high school for only a few weeks before dropping out to work. On his way to school, Wright and a friend would bicycle through the white section of town and dig through the garbage cans for magazines and books to read. This excerpt from Black Boy, originally published in 1945, talks about that first publication. READ MORE

I am going to have to read the new Chris Hedges book, aren't I. Here is a very odd excerpt, from the book's opening! And as a total index junkie, I can tell you what: this book has a hot index. ANDREA DWORKIN FOR THE WIN.