Oh, Kafka, we always reference you in times of simultaneous weirdness and banality.

"'So your idea is to drive across America and write about it without talking to a single American?' 'Yes.'" Karl Ove Knausgaard travels North America as “a tongue-in-cheek Tocqueville” for the New York Times Magazine.  Pair with his piece for The Millions, "The View from My Window is a Constant Reminder," and with Jonathan Callahan's reading of Knausgaard's My Struggle.

"I’ve learned that people—writers and non-writers alike—don’t like that word. Failure....  I take a bizarre pleasure, now, in using that word. Maybe because during my decade as a failed writer, the one thing that took the edge off was wallowing in that failure—carefully, in a proscribed fashion, like having a drink when you’re still hungover." Stephanie Feldman writes for Vol. 1 Brooklyn about being a literary failure, about the two books she wrote and never published, and about the one she finally did. Pair with the stories of these 5 writers and their failed "novels in drawers."

The Critterati pets-in-literary-garb contest ends at midnight tonight!  You can view a gallery of the submissions as they appear, and some of them are phenomenal.  I especially like Humbert Humbert.  I don't know how these people got their animals to cooperate (drugs, probably).  Big Ed and Nadine, aged six months, made it quite clear that under no circumstances would they be dressed up as Lata and Kabir from A Suitable Boy (what am I supposed to do with this tiny cardboard cricket bat now?)  Henry and June was also a non-starter, but that might have been unkind to do to siblings, anyway.  No one wants to see his sister chew up a garter belt. Evidently I'm not the only one to encounter massive opposition.

On Monday night Cheryl Strayed, also loved  as The Rumpus's "Dear Sugar" advice columnist, was celebrated at Housing Works Bookstore. Tiffany Gibert gives us the scoop in the latest installment of #LitBeat.