Brief Hideous Movie

Readers of the 1960s and 70s ran into many people who worried that writers were learning from television. In 2015, the concern is slightly different -- are writers taking cues from video games? At the Ploughshares blog, Matthew Burnside tackles the game-ification of books.

Writing a novel together might seem like a recipe for conflict, but Gavin Kovite and Christopher Robinson, who co-wrote War of the Encyclopaedists together, argue the exercise ended up deepening their longtime friendship. At Salon, they explain why.

Both Ed and the Washington Post interview Tobias Wolff on the occasion of the release of his new collection, Our Story Begins.Bookride chronicles some of the most unlikely and amazing discoveries in the history of book collecting. In part one, he discusses many runners-up - including "An incredible collection of modern first editions, mostly fine in jackets turned up in the 1980s in a shed in the Australian desert causing dealers to fly in from New York, Berkeley and Santa Barbara." Part two covers the greatest find. It begins "In 1907, during his second expedition to Chinese Central Asia, Sir Aurel Stein, a Hungarian-born British archaeologist, encountered a monk who showed him a hoard of manuscripts preserved in a cave near Dunhuang."In BOMB, Zachary Lazar and Christopher Sorrentino discuss Lazar's book Sway. Lazar appeared in our Year in Reading.You may have to wait ten years for the rest of it, but Junot Diaz gives readers a sneak peak at his next novel at Omnivoracious.Baseball predictions, highly personalized.J.K. Rowling, now retired from writing about a boy wizard, has embarked on the next step of her career, protecting her legacy. First up is a lawsuit against a companion book written by a superfan librarian. But, as the Times seems to indicate with its account of the trial, that way madness lies: "The librarian, Steven Jan Vander Ark, had the mild-mannered demeanor of Ron Weasley, and the intelligence, charm - and haircut - of Harry Potter. Even his name sounds like that of a character in one of the books, if preceded by "Lord" or "Master." Although, at 50, he is older than Ms. Rowling, 42, he looked like a schoolboy, with an unlined face and caramel-colored hair parted down the middle."