“When you ain’t got no money, you gotta get an attitude.”

The writers below got plenty of the latter. Maybe some of the former. We won’t claim to know. We just know you better like their stories, or else…

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Time slipped on by last week, so there’s a flurry of catching up to do. I’m not going to waste any time because there’s a backlog. David Foster Wallace’s (that possessive is of the posthumous “sort of” variety) The Pale King was reviewed all over the internet. The Awl took the opportunity to explore DFW as a self-help guru. Head to NPR for some content: Steve Inskeep examines the supposed liberal bias. Ira Glass shares some of his storytelling secrets. And on the station itself, a look into the lending library in the e-book age, which is not so good out in LA. I’m taking a trip to Baltimore this weekend; I’m hoping it is the best of times and not the worst of times.  Of course, there are still some other literary locales to visit.

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Cowboy Maloney’s Electric City, by Michael Bible, ships today.

Today we talk with Amanda Raczkowski and Joseph Reed of Caketrain about the pricing of books, the importance of design, and what surprises they have forthcoming.

BG: Tell us about the beginnings of Caketrain. When did you start and why?

AR: Joe and I attended the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg. While we were there, Joe served as the editor of Pendulum, the campus literary journal, and I worked on the two issues that were released our final year of undergraduate work. There was a strong desire in us to be able to remain a part of the literary community after graduation and having the experience from Pendulum we thought what a better way to participate in the literary community than to become an avenue to highlight and champion artists. Caketrain’s first issue was released in early 2004.

JR: I can never overemphasize how thankful I am to have edited Pendulum for two years. It allowed me the opportunity to perform a lot of quiet trial-and-error and go through the general process of collection, curation, layout, design and printing in a way that made me feel like I was entering Caketrain with something of a veteran outlook — though of course after almost eight years of Caketrain I find I’m still learning new things every year. But on some level — and I think Amanda probably feels the same way, as I know she’s been exposed to editing and publishing since at least high school — Caketrain came as a culmination of an obsession with the collecting and packaging and refinement of artistic work.

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Baseball’s back, amigos. But Obama, our commander in cleats, wasn’t there to throw out the first pitch at the Nationals game this morning. Why? Don’t believe everything you read or hear. Truth be told he was here with us going over this week’s fiction picks. Three wars and March Madness, and he still made time for us. Who says he don’t work hard, huh? Enjoy.

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