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My most recent book, One Nation, Under God, is now available in paperback. If you’ve been worried about the state of the beleaguered book-publishing industry, buying books is the perfect bailout: unlike your assistance to Wall Street, you’ll actually get something in return for your money. Even better, I promise not to give myself a multi-million-dollar bonus at the end of the year.

As always, I urge you to support your neighborhood bookstore. (After-Words, The Book Cellar, and Fact & Fiction are three excellent choices.) If you’re one of those unlucky people without a neighborhood bookstore, buy it from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Powell’s. Your purchase is a vote of confidence for the continued production of quality American fiction by yours truly.

Weeding a stack of papers and articles the other day, I came across something I’d clipped from the November 2007 Atlantic. In “The Future of the American Idea,” the magazine’s editors asked various contributors to share extremely concise thoughts on, well, the future of the “American Idea.” Some were good, some were bad–the whole exercise seemed a little stagey–but David Foster Wallace hit it out of the park in “Just Asking“:

In still other words, what if we chose to accept the fact that every few years, despite all reasonable precautions, some hundreds or thousands of us may die in the sort of ghastly terrorist attack that a democratic republic cannot 100-percent protect itself from without subverting the very principles that make it worth protecting?

Yet another reason to miss Wallace.