Sunday, March 30, 2014

Mysterious New Book About Wall Street Due Out Monday; Will It Rock the Street?

A new book is coming Monday by Michael Lewis, the author of Liar's Poker, Moneyball, The Big Short and The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game.

New York Magazine reports:
.It’s called Flash Boys, but its actual subject has been not just a mystery but something of a guessing game among journalists, publishers, and finance types. To close readers of Lewisania (and there are very many) it might have been fairly obvious that the book was about high-frequency trading — brokers gaining microsecond advantages on automated exchanges...
.
But no one could be absolutely sure, because the book has been, through the entire run of its production cycle, a complete ghost...

.It wasn’t listed in publisher W.W. Norton’s catalog, and though it’ll appear this Sunday on 60 Minutes, today’s Amazon description still reads, blankly, “Michael Lewis returns to the financial world with a new book that gives readers a ringside seat as the biggest story in years prepares to hit Wall Street.” But what story is that — the subject of Flash Boys, or Flash Boys itself? In that Times item, Norton said only that it was “squarely in the realm of Wall Street”...

A rushed, stealth publication and an embargo mandated by 60 Minutes are hardly unprecedented, but they’re exceedingly rare when the subject is a long-form work of financial journalism, heavy on hard numbers and colorful personalities, instead of, say, a celebrity tell-all, an account of killing bin Laden, or a trumped-up Benghazi exposé. This is a writer who made his mark with a dishy Salomon Brothers tell-all and his name with a portrait of an innovative baseball manager — compelling stories, but hardly the kind of books that are gobbled up on the Acela the morning of publication. So when did Michael Lewis become Bob Woodward?
While Norton refused to comment on their cloak-and-dagger publication strategy, Michael Lewis himself was happy to chat yesterday by phone...

 “It’s scoopier than most of my narratives.” ...Lewis is feeling pretty confident. “I think that in this case, I have lighting in a bottle,” he says
Order the book here.

2 comments:

  1. Stock market rigged, says Michael Lewis in new book

    Michael Lewis' "Flash Boys" reveals how a group of unlikely characters discovered how some high-speed traders work the stock market to their advantage
    http://www.cbsnews.com/news/stock-market-rigged-says-michael-lewis-in-new-book/

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. "Stock market rigged, says Michael Lewis in new book"

      And in his next book, Lewis exposes that "water is wet" and "fire is hot"

      Delete