Cameo · Facebook · Veep

When pulling together last week’s budget sweep, I included a link to an excerpt of Among the Bros, a new book about a College of Charleston crime ring based in the school’s frat houses. It wasn’t until I opened my Kindle that weekend that I realized why the case sounded so familiar — not, as I imagined, because I recalled 2016’s Charleston Post and Courier report “Cocaine, pills … and textbooks” (what a headline, huh?) but because I had a review copy on hand. And now you know how I spent every free moment I had this weekend, gulping down journalist Max Marshall’s first book.

Marshall’s byline is familiar to magazine readers; you’ve read his stuff at Texas Monthly (he lives in Austin), among others. He’s accomplished, and his writing is chewy in an artisanal cookie kind of way. But this is an ambitious story to take on for a first book. When you write for a magazine, it’s a collaboration — your editor is there for every line with a firm hand, and most still-in-print pubs have second and third lines of defense with fact-checking teams and copy editors. (“People hate to pitch Vanity Fair,” one of my editors once told me, “because our line editors ask so many questions.” Fuck that, I love it and that have saved me from myself so many times!)

As is well known by now (see: Jill Abramson and Naomi Wolf), book publishing doesn’t have that same set of safety nets. Which is bananas, because books are, arguably, more permanent and harder to correct! There are financial reasons for this, and the published authors in our readership can weigh in on this in the comments.