Inside Jacket

President Obama was spotted leaving the Martha’s Vineyard bookstore Bunch of Grapes with an advance copy of Jonathan Franzen’s novel “Freedom.”

Peter Pan paraphernalia found in the same trunk as the mummied remains of two infants has led to speculation that the babies, who died in the nineteen-thirties, may have been relatives of the author J. M. Barrie.

For when you feel like wallowing in those late-summer blues: ten novels about suburban ennui.

One professor of management at Texas Tech University has replaced business school textbooks with graphic novels.

The Huffington Post on the most innovative university presses—and what to expect from each.

Is the New York Times fair in its choices of which books to review, and who should review them?

Seventy bookstores in twenty-five states have raised forty-eight thousand dollars in a fundraiser for the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression.

On shame, depression, and humor: read an extract from Sarah Silverman’s memoir, “The Bedwetter.”

The Nigerian publisher Farafina Books is one of a growing number of houses dedicated to publishing books by African authors for African readers.

Have e-readers made the bookworm’s life more fashionable?

Our post on Bruce McCall’s new book posed the question of what we should do with books (now that reading is dead). Dita Von Teese, the Burlesque superstar and aficionado of all things exaggeratedly retro, has an answer. Her new title, “Dita: Stripteese,” is entirely wordless. Instead, it consists of three of the eponymous acts, each contained in its own compact flipbook. In them, Von Teese strips to the (almost) buff; she dances; she swings in a birdcage wearing little aside from pheasant-feather wings; she prances and bathes in the cup of a Martini glass whilst dousing herself in alcohol from a succulent olive.

The result feels oddly like catching Tinkerbell cavorting in Wendy’s knicker drawer (minus, of course, her little green frock). It’s a little sexy and a little funny, and, mostly, just little. My, look at her go, you think, she could practically fit in the thimble! (In fact, compared to most women, Von Teese almost could: like the ladies of J. M. Barrrie’s day, Von Teese’s waist, from the repeated cinching of so many corsets, is a mere twenty-two inches, and can be laced down to a breathtaking 16.5.)

But is this book for lost boys? The packaging would seem to suggest otherwise. It looks like a little girl’s jewelry box—pink and diamond encrusted—and undoing the ribbons clasping shut its seductive covers reveals almost the same interior: purples and pinks, faux velvet and jewels, and, at the center of it all, the flipbook with the ballet-trained Von Teese turning elegantly on red point shoes. If a tinny, tinkling music accompanied her, the comparison would be complete.

But if it’s intended for women—well, why? Perhaps Teese is less a tease than a teacher. “Everything I have is manufactured,” she once said, and now she’s making her product available in mass, capitalizing on the mania for pole-dancing classes in local gyms and pussycat wannabes on national TV. What better way to learn to dance than to break it down one step and one frame at a time, and then speed it up and flow it together —rather like a flipbook? Disciples can emulate her curves as well as her moves by buying Dita Von Teese lingerie, Wonderbras bearing her brand. Now someone just needs to get going on making those massive martini glasses.