Different Kinds of Lost Boys

Samuel Garang Akau, one of the “Lost Boys of Sudan” read his first novel, Animal Farm, while a teenager in a refugee camp in Kenya. He had to share the book with 30 others. With two parents and a brother killed in sectarian violence, Akau found his way to Stanford’s English Department, where one of his short stories won a prize. He plans to write "at least four or five novels. And a memoir," he said. It will be "not my story alone, but the story of a lot of people."

The New York Times gives Toby Young’s new memoir, The Sound of No Hands Clapping, a thumbs up. Young may be one of the most conceited, self-centered, celebrity-gawking losers on the planet, but he sure writes funny.

Silence of the City is a new website devoted to printing rejected “Talk of the Town,” pieces from the New Yorker. Great name. I can see why some of the pieces never made it into the magazine.