The Daily Beast recently profiled Katie Kitamura (Princeton '99), whose debut novel, The Long Shot, is out this month from Free Press. Although the Beast pokes fun at the "young Asian ballerina" who wrote a novel about MMA, or ultimate fighting, they can't help but admit that the book is fantastic:

"Katie Kitamura, a Princeton-educated former ballerina, has produced a lean, taut little novel as authentic as any sport could hope to have represent it. The Long Shot, her debut effort, reads the way we imagine the best fighters to be: quiet, measured, self-assured, always thinking ahead.

This book sounded like a great end-of-summer read, so we checked it out and convinced the author to give away a personalized, signed copy to one IvyGate commenter.

That's right! For all of the times when you've bashed our posts, calling us out on typos or less-than-stellar sentence structure, the tables have turned, anonymous friends.  To enter, Leave your most awesome fight story in the comments. We'll update this post to let you know who Katie has selected as the winner on Sept 1, and you can email IvyGate to claim your prize.

So, to recap: Leave a fight story in the comments. You have until Sept 1 to make shit up recall that drunken night at 1020 where you maybe clocked your orgo TA over a wrongly-graded problem set. You can enter as many times as you'd like.

Ready? Let the commenting begin.

Edit: We have winners! Two, actually. H'?? (Gentlemen's Death Club dude) and "Two Tooth" Tommy. Email your mailing address/instructions to personalize to robyn@ivygateblog.com. Congrats!

Lately, everyone’s been going on about how they wish they could hate Nick McDonell, Harvard ’07, whose third novel, An Expensive Education, came out earlier this month. They want to hate him, interestingly enough, for the exact reasons they want to hate the Ivy League: rich, connected, intelligent, internationally famous, good-looking, well endow—um, you get the picture.

Just like wait-listed Harvard hopefuls who secretly despise their already accepted classmates, many of McDonell’s latest interviewers haven’t quite been able to mask their sheer loathing for the lot they’ve been cast. Oh no, of course they’re not bitter. Not when the New York Times journalist deems McDonell’s background “insufferable” and calls him out on having (wait for it!) used family connections for summer internships.  I know! Surely you too are shocked.
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Good news! Aliza Shvarts—the Yalie who staged a hostile takeover of the 24-hour news cycle last spring with nothing but a turkey baster, a jar of vaseline, and her fertile loins—is back, in the most ironic role possible: Educating little girls on reproductive health.

That's right, Yale's most notorious artist is a featured contributor in My Little Red Book, an anthology of first period stories edited by fellow Eli Rachel Kauder Nalebuff. Blurbed by Gloria Steinem, My Little Red Book is a strangely high-profile affair featuring the likes of Erica Jong and Gossip Girl originator Cecily von Ziegesar. Luckily, even the heftiest of literary minds is rendered totally preposterous in the face of adolescent menstruation and associated awkwardness, so this will be a fun post, after all. For a frighteningly weird peek into reproductive lives of Shvarts-Period-Art, Jong, and von Ziegesar (featuring phrases like "blood and poop and pee" and "clean white crotch of another girl") read on!

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If we were all given a time machine and a fat envelope from Harvard College, chances are that many of us would take it. Because when it comes down to brand appeal, endowment size, and ability to inspire a tangled matrix of envy and admiration, Harvard is king. But since most of us will never know the Yard from the inside, we must content ourselves with denigrating it in public and obsessing over it in private, through books like Ahead of the Curve by Philip Delves Broughton.

The memoir, which was reviewed by the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, traces the two years Broughton spent as an MBA student at Harvard Business School. What seems especially interesting about Broughton's book is that he entered HBS not as a businessman but as a journalist; before entering the Class of 2006 he was Paris Bureau Chief for the London Daily Telegraph.

As the WSJ reviewer notes:

Some of what he found won't be surprising, particularly the sense of entitlement for which its students and faculty are famous. The self-regard must get handed out with the matriculation packets. Most graduate business schools, you might have noticed, award MBAs. HBS, according to the dean, specializes in "transformational experiences."

It's fitting that "transformational experiences" sounds a lot like freshman convocation jargon since Broughton makes HBS sound a lot like college. The MBA's "had two modes: deadly serious and frat boy, with little in between." More titillating details after the jump.

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Once again it’s time for another installment of everyone’s favorite chick lit romp through the mystery-filled tomb of Skull & Bones--er, Rose & Grave. Yale Grad (’01) Diana Peterfreund delivers schadenfreude, secret society pranks and sex (okay, foreplay) on the beach in Rites of Spring (Break), the latest book in her “Ivy League Novel “ quartet, out from Delta Fiction earlier this month.

“Eli” (read: Yale) University senior Amy “Bugaboo” Haskel is panicked about graduation. But when she and her fellow Rose & Grave knights pull a prank on rival society Dragon’s Head, Amy winds up with a lot more to worry about than her lack of job offers. Dragon’s Head wants revenge, and they’ve chosen Amy as their target. After months of dye in her shampoo, crickets in her dorm suite, and soda dumped on her textbooks, Amy is more than ready to party it up during Spring Break. Rather than Cancun, our plucky heroine heads for Cavador Key, her secret society’s private island. But Cavador Key isn’t exactly drama free, either. Someone has infiltrated the island, and Amy must dodge death threats, bad seafood, and the prying eyes of her society members as she starts hooking up with Jamie, a society patriarch who avid fans will remember as the villain from past books in the series.

Along with the gang from previous books (including a governor’s playboy son, a former teen actress, a lesbian activist, a straight-edge genius computer programmer and a Manhattan socialite), Peterfreund adds another gem to the cast of society types we love to hate: Darren, the high school-aged son of society patriarch and disgraced senator, who proclaims of Aristotle, “I find his tone to be remarkably jejune.”

Rites of Spring (Break) is the perfect beach read for Ivy Leaguers who want a break from academia, but not from campus drama. Peterfreund has created a sympathetic and spirited heroine who, despite her annoying penchant for confessions and lists, you kind of wish you became friends with back in lit hum. In spite of the peppy cover, poppy narrative and preppy undertones, Peterfreund definitely knows how to create suspense. And her—I mean, Amy’s--thoughts on the impending doom of graduation are uncomfortably on the mark:

The biggest problem with being a relatively small fish in the best pond ever is that you start to lower your own expectations. Maybe if I’d gone to a smaller school, or a less prestigious school, I’d have convinced myself that I was still the hotshot I was as a high school valedictorian headed to an Ivy League college. Instead, I’d spent three years recalibrating my dreams to fit into the caste that the resident geniuses at Eli had shown me to be a part of. Above average, to be sure, but not summa.”

There were a few too many loose ends for my taste (but then again, my taste isn’t exactly romance novels, so maybe I’m off course), and a couple of lines that made me snort (and not in an ‘oh, that’s funny’ way), but overall, if you’re looking for a book to toss in your tote on the way to Cape Cod, or just want to convince yourself that being a Philo pwns the shit out of being in a real secret society, this is a pretty good pick.