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The Post asked me to take 15 years of reporting on the Hunt for Bin Laden and edit it into a single narrative, which they then gave to Amazon to distribute electronically as “Kindle Single.” It’s 18,000 words and costs $1.99 to instantly download into your e-reader. There is suddenly an apparently thriving market in these not-quite-book-but-more-than-article type pieces. Production costs, practically zero. Distribution costs, practically zero. Price barrier? Negligible. Could this be the salvation of non-fiction story-telling?

The Hunt for bin Laden (Kindle Single)

www.amazon.com

Here’s the way a great columnist can capture the zeitgeist in a phrase: Sally Jenkins on Tiger fatigue after Rory McIlroy’s historic win at Congressional . . .

“I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for a new champion who doesn’t treat the world as his spittoon.”

Henry Allen’s best piece in years here.

If you are able to come out to the Post Hunt that starts noon Sunday in downtown DC, when things die down from the zany and (for us) terrifying kickoff, around 1 pm, stop me and say hi. I’ll be wandering with an expression of dazed anxiety. Dave Barry, Gene Weingarten and I chatted about it on the Post site today for an hour, without giving out a single bit of useful info.

I keep neglecting this blog because “blogging” turns out to involve “writing.” But I hereby apologize to my legions of fan for being such a poor correspondent. Lots of stuff going on with various Story Surgeons projects, so maybe I’ll just update here so this space can maintain its well-deserved reputation as “blog of record.”

* T.M. Shine’s hilarious picaresque novel, Nothing Happens Until It Happens to You didn’t become a bestseller, as I’d hoped and it deserved, but months after publication it was chosen for a Florida Book Award, where it was in some pretty distinguished company. Now the paperback will be brought out in September — go out and buy it. Or just stay in and click it.

* Scott Higham’s and Sari Horwitz’s book Finding Chandra, which was nominated for a Poe award, was the basis of a TLC documentary, starring . . . Scott and Sari, who both demonstrated excellent TV talking head chops.

* Snigdha Prakash’s fabulous book All the Justice Money Can Buy — a kind of Civil Action narrative about the battle between Big Pharma (Merck, makers of VIOXX) and Big Personal Injury Lawyers, a titanic struggle  that leaves the victims as mere footnotes — will be published in June. Snigdha will be at Politics and Prose on June 18.

* I’ll be talking about Fire on the Horizon at the Gaithersburg Book Festival at 11 a.m. on May 21. I was so tickled to discover that FOH made it into one of my favorite venues, Hank Stuever’s One-Man Book Club, and if you follow Hank on Twitter you’ll get noticed everytime he uncorks one of these perfect and perfectly solipsistic reflections on reading on his website, Tinsel.

Guess I need to go and face my intimidating to-do list, including depositing cash money in my son’s bank account, which also necessitates doing the kind of writing that actually provides said money.

NPR’s Weekend Edition interview with my co-author about Fire on the Horizon: http://links.visibli.com/links/db3962

The Daily Beast

The Miami Herald

I’ve been participating in a monthly gig for the Nieman Foundation’s website devoted to narrative journalism. Each month, a group of editors discuss, tweeze, slam, praise, or whatever a notable piece of long-form journalism. The first month (February) was on David von Drehle’s Time piece on the Tucson shootings. This month’s discussion is about Mac McClelland’s  Mother Jones piece on rampant rape in Haiti’s displaced person camps. It’s worth taking a look.

Doing Twitter searches for “Fire on the Horizon” enables me to instantly find any early reviews, however obscure, and in the age of the Blog, they can pop up in some pretty obscure places indeed. “Enable” is the key word. As any recently published author can tell you, the addiction to hunting down any and all info about “how the book is doing” can become severe. In the old days, beside doing general web searches and checking the Amazon number every hour, you were pretty much at the mercy of your publicist to learn of far-flung reviews. Now, since anyone who writes ANYTHING will Tweet about it, I think I am pretty much All Seeing.

Click below for some examples of what’s popped up this week:

Roanoke Times-Dispatch

Coast Guard Blog

Old Salt Blog