- Rumors of John Cheever’s death? Greatly exaggerated.
- HarperCollins sets out to test the proposition that there really is no such thing as bad publicity.
- BHL rips Valkyrie and Tom Cruise.
- Maud lauds Marlon James, author of The Book of Night Women.
- The New York Public Library names Millions guest contributor Sana Krasikov a finalist for its Young Lions award. Congratulations, Sana!
- More Intelligent Life interviews Jon Fasman, another Young Lion in waiting and author of The Unpossessed City
- Also at MiL: Lorin Stein wants a stimulus plan for book critics. (Hear! Hear!)
- Millions-fave Paul Theroux interviewed by the Boston Globe: “People say to me: How can I become a writer? I always say: one, leave home; two, tell the truth.”
- xkcd takes on the Kindle.
- “Jack Kerouac’s ‘lost’ novel The Sea is My Brother, which he wrote during his years as a merchant seaman, is to be published in its entirety for the first time.”
- Soon there will be a literary prize for everyone: “The St. Francis College Literary Prize is designed for a fourth published book of fiction.” ($50,000!)
- The strangest title shortlist
- Via Gwenda, the Wikipedia find of the week: “A book curse was the most widely-employed and effective method of discouraging the thievery of manuscripts during the medieval period.”
- The best reasoning yet for why the Kindle/”Text-to-Speech” uproar is dumb. Meanwhile, Amazon backs down.
- “I”, “we”, “two” and “three” the oldest English words.
- A resourceful group of Chinese enthusiasts creates bootleg translations of every issue of The Economist.
- Shark-jumping: “HarperCollins Pays Big Advance For A Book Of… Tweets“
- Stuff White Readers Should Like
Curiosities: Bootleg Translations
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Re the book curses, I read a memorable example from the monastery of San Pedro in Barcelona in A Passion for Books ed. by Harold Rabinowitz & Rob Kaplan, 1999:
"For him that stealteh, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain, crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to this agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails…and when he at last goeth to his final punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him forever."