Quickly Noted

Keith Gessen of New York gets to hang out with Salman Rushdie at Yankee Stadium, where they spend as much time talking about the Yankees' pitching depth as they do Indian literature. Sometimes in tandem: "I don’t think you'd find Sir Vidia at a baseball game, do you? I don't think sports are one of his interests."

Meanwhile, Jeffrey Trachtenberg files a story for the Wall Street Journal on the bumper crop of Iraq War memoirs. John Crawford and Kayla Williams have already gotten plenty of attention, of course, but the mini-genre heats up in October with releases by Colby Buzzell, Jason Christopher Hartley, and Nathaniel Fick. (Remember that I called Fick's One Bullet Away "the best memoir I've read in at least a year.")

photo: Paolo Pelegrin/Magnum