For the last couple of weeks, Amazon and Wal-Mart have been at war online. The megastores are heavily discounting highly anticipated book releases and causing a windstorm among publishers and other opponents who see the business tactics as disastrous on an already fragile industry.

Currently, Wal-Mart has priced its "Top 50 Preorders" of titles like Sarah Palin's Going Rogue and James Patterson's I, Alex Cross at $8.98 whereas Amazon is selling those titles for $9.00. And according to the Wall Street Journal, these two brilliant giants are selling the books at a loss.

The price war comes off as a "who's got the biggest discount" contest rather than a strategy to offer savings to customers. Perhaps that's why Target and Sears joined the battle. No one wants to look like they have a small, you know, discount.

But what about the consumer? Sure, the immediate savings of snatching a new hardcover for nine bucks when it usually retails for more than twenty dollars sounds good now. But are there long-term implications for the book industry and independent bookstores that can't possibly slash prices so low? Many indies have closed citing reasons of bleak economic climate and increased competition by megastores and online sellers. Will consumers become spoiled by these deals and expect lower prices on all books? Will it only be a matter of time before Wal-Mart and Amazon, who don't exclusively sell books, expect publishers to carry the discounts on their backs?

James Surowiecki writes inThe New Yorker:

"Outraged book publishers and booksellers are making exaggerated claims about how the discounts will devalue books and wreck the industry. But they're right about one thing. The real competition in this price war is not between Wal-Mart and Amazon but between those behemoths and everyone else-and the damage everyone else is incurring is deliberate, not collateral. Wal-Mart and Amazon have figured out how to fight a price war and win: make sure someone else takes the blows."

Barbara Meade, co-founder of Washington, DC-based independent bookstore Politics and Prose made an interesting point: "It's a totally different market. If Wal-Mart started selling pork chops for $1.79 a pound, they're not going to put Whole Foods out of business. There is plenty of room for everyone."

But in war, there's always a loser. The question is: who will that be?

When trendy goes wrong: In August, author Teri Woods, best known for her True to the Game street fiction trilogy, threw a party at the hard-to-get-into New York club Greenhouse to celebrate her new book Alibi.

Unfortunately, the majority of her 175 invitees couldn't get in. The reason? They're claiming racism.

But this isn't just talk. A one billion dollar class-action suit has been filed against the club according to the New York Daily News.

One of the plaintiffs, Kashan Robinson, told the Daily News, “They should have just put up a sign that said, ‘No Coloreds Allowed’. There was no reason for them to not allow us into that club, except for the color of our skin.”

Woods agrees and is apparently thinking of pursuing her own legal case. She told the paper that most of her black guests (which amounted to about one hundred people), including her family and friends, were denied entry while white invitees had been let in. Woods also said that she received text messages from the club's owner Barry Mullineaux that "had something to do with ‘your people’ and ‘fat’.

Naturally, Mullineaux disagrees with the claims and calls the charges “bogus.”

Even if the club's intentions weren't racist (although that would be hard to argue), I know if it was my book party, a sista would be hot. I find it hard to believe that there wasn't a conversation with management about door policies prior to Woods scheduling her launch party at Greenhouse.

Would I be billion-dollar hot? No. But hot nonetheless, and I would definitely seek some sort of retribution.

Here are a few titles for those looking to water their intellectual growth.

Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Clinton

By Duchess Harris

Palgrave Macmillan, July 2009

A scholarly review of the involvement of black women in American politics from 1961 to 2001 that includes a range of areas including government roles, feminist organizations, literature, movies, and beauty pageants.

Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

By Robin D.G. Kelley

Simon and Schuster, October 2009

This long-awaited biography from Kelley, historian and music aficionado, draws from Monk's family archives and unreleased recordings to painstakingly capture the jazz composer and pianist's person, spirit, and often unrecognized genius. Kelly debunks the myths that surrounded Monk during his life and in his death, provides explanations for Monk's sometimes erratic behavior—which was partly due to untreated mental illness—and examines the artist’s contributions to the growth of jazz.

Read an excerpt of Thelonious Monk. Below, watch Robin Kelley discuss his motivations for writing the book.

Speech : Race and Barack Obama's "A More Perfect Union"

Edited by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting

Bloomsbury USA, August 2009

Using President Obama's "A More Perfect Union," his popular 2008 speech on race, a diverse cross-section of intellectuals riff on the historical, political, and social impact of the highly-praised address. Read an excerpt of Speech posted on The Root.

Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud

By Cornel West with David Ritz

Hay House, October 2009

With the help of an accomplished biographer, one of America's most well-known public intellectuals has penned his memoirs in efforts to probe what he considers, the "dark precincts" of his soul. West gets personal revisiting his schoolboy days, his growth into a flawed man and celebrated scholar, his battle with cancer, and provides introspection into his own human condition.

Check out:

Robin Kelley talks about his motivation to write Thelonious Monk.

A round up of lit-related questions.

South Africans Vs. Nigerians?

Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie discusses what she considers a strained relationship between Nigerians and South Africans in an essay for The Guardian. The piece comes on the heels of the news that Nigerian officials are fighting to ban the movie District 9 from playing in theaters because of it's portrayal of Nigerians living in South Africa.

Adichie writes:

South Africans and Nigerians (and indeed other African immigrant groups) have simply not had the time or the neutral space to grow an organic understanding of each other. The Nigerians arrive with their different, more distant colonial experience, with their mercantile spirit, with none of the conditioning of the South African menial wage-earning experience and - yes - with that swagger. They arrive in a vulnerable country where the legacy of institutional exclusion still thrives. They create spaces for themselves in whatever way they can and, of course, they arouse resentment.

And these are people who, like me, grew up in a Nigeria that was fiercely anti-apartheid. We all sang Free Mandela. In primary school, we collected money to free the brothers in South Africa. Perhaps this is the reason I found South Africa a disconcerting place to visit, in the end. I felt incapable of truly understanding it, ill-equipped to grasp meaning and nuance, in a way that I have not experienced anywhere else in sub-Saharan Africa. It cracked my pan-African idealism.

What do you think about Adichie's thoughts? Sad? True?

Do African-American Studies Departments Need to be Revamped?

Conservative writer John McWhorter proposes changes to Black Studies departments in his blog for The New Republic.

He suggests:

It's time that African-American Studies departments let go of the sixties imperative to defend blacks as eternal victims of racism. Black people can do their best even under imperfect conditions—and if that reality is irrelevant to an African-American Studies curriculum, then we must question the value of said curricula to those whom they purport to speak up for: real people in this real world. This real world which will never be perfect—even for descendants of African slaves.

In 2009, the study of blackness must be the study of a race most of whose members are now victors, not victims. Certainly the victims must be studied—but only within a genuine commitment to saving them, not chronicling them as helpless until America turns upside down in a fashion no one could seriously imagine will ever happen.

Agree/disagree with McWhorter?

Could America Use More Amiri Barakas?

Writer and activist Amiri Baraka turns seventy-five this week and celebrations are taking place all week around his hometown of Newark, New Jersey. The Star-Ledger profiled Baraka and his artistic contributions. About Baraka, Newark Mayor Corey Booker said, "I have a problem with people who criticize but do nothing to change things, but that's not Amiri Baraka. He's always been a dedicated servant of the city. He's utterly sincere in his desire to make Newark a better place. He comes from a noble American tradition of fighting for change, which includes pamphleteers like Thomas Paine to civil rights leaders. I will have nothing but love for Mr. Baraka."

Could we use more artists who are also activists?

Not Enough Color in Children's Books?

Numbers don't (usually) lie. According to an article in Catalyst Chicago, "Of the 5,000 children's books published every year, no more than 5 percent are written by or about blacks, Asians, Latinos or Native Americans." Couple that with experts’ suggestions that children, black boys in particular, need to see themselves in literature to "foster a love of reading that will help build literacy skills."

The article raises a good point:

In libraries and bookstores, African-American boys are missing, both as characters in books and as readers. The two absences are related and feed off each other, according to literacy experts: If young African-American males don't see themselves in books, they aren't inclined to become readers, and if publishers perceive that black boys don't read, they won't approve books that might interest them.

Agree with the point made in the article? Should there be more books featuring children of color?

Have You Heard of Sarah E. Wright?

Sad to say that I hadn't until I saw her obituary in the New York Times. Wright died last month at age 80. Here's more about her:

In 1969 Sarah E. Wright, a Maryland-born writer living in Manhattan, published her first novel, "This Child's Gonna Live." Issued by Delacorte Press, it portrays the lives of an impoverished black woman and her family in a Maryland fishing village during the Depression. Often compared to the work of Zora Neale Hurston, the novel was unusual in its exploration of the black experience from a woman's perspective, anticipating fiction by writers like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker.

“This Child's Gonna Live" was hailed by critics around the country and named an outstanding book of 1969 by The New York Times. Reviewing it in The Times Book Review earlier that year, the novelist Shane Stevens called it a "small masterpiece," adding: "Sarah Wright's triumph in this novel is a celebration of life over death. It is, in every respect, an impressive achievement."

Ms. Wright never published another novel.

Adding her novel to my reading list. You?