Literature By The Numbers

Clusty has unveiled a very cool Shakespeare search engine, allowing one to sift through all the bard’s works with the push of a button.The Washington Post is hosting live lunchtime chats with various authors over the next two weeks to coincide with the 2006 National Book Festival. The highlight: Geraldine Brooks, author of Pulitzer Prize-winning The March on Thursday.Just announced: Another Hannibal book from Thomas Harris called Hannibal Rising, prompting Ed to call Harris “The Laziest Titler in the Publishing Industry.”

What’s it like to win the Literary Review‘s Bad Sex award? As 2010 “winner” Rowan Somerville reports, “It’s a hard pill to swallow … Despite the magazine’s assertion that ‘it’s only a bit of fun’ there’s an atmosphere of bullying peculiar to public schools about the whole thing.”

Didn’t like how the Utterly Uncle Fred stories ended? Now is your chance to rewrite them and other P.G. Wodehouse favorites. At The Toast, Mallory Ortberg presents “Choose Your Own P.G. Wodehouse Adventure.”

“Will anyone in America give a damn about Beig? It’s hard to imagine our glittering zeitgest machine ever getting behind her, with her landscape, her women, her knowledge of the secret lives of animals born for the hatchet. Her writing, so invested in the disappearing rural world, is particular, yes, but universal: her characters love and long and pine away.” Matthew Neill Null is unsatisfied with how American readers have treated the work of the great German novelist Maria Beig. He makes a passionate case in her favor in this new essay over at The Paris Review.

Jon Methven (of This Is Your Captain Speaking) has a problem: one of his characters trashed his novel on Amazon.