“Great pendulous melons dangled like gods”

Did you read a short story today? He did.Samantha Hunt scribbles on bar napkins.Deborah Eisenberg not only writes great stories; she also gives a great interview.A Peter Markus story - free! - at failbetter.com.A Ben Fountain story - free! - at The Barcelona Review.Bookslut chats up Elizabeth Crane.Death is dead (via Conversational Reading).

Hate your job? At least you’ve never been Stanley Kubrick’s secretary: “Instead of having [‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’] typed on only the few sheets seen by viewers, the director asked his secretary Margaret Warrington to type it on each one of the 500-odd sheets in the stack. What’s more, he also had Warrington type up an equivalent number of manuscript pages in four languages—French, German, Italian, Spanish—for foreign releases of [The Shining].”

The Guardian asked: what childhood reads inspired authors like Margaret Atwood, Sue Townsend and Doris Lessing?

At The Guardian, Susanna Rustin interviews the Irish writer Edna O’Brien, whose new anthology of stories, The Love Object, comes out as an e-book this week. Among other things, she compares a writer who works on a book for only one day a week with a parent who leaves a toddler unsupervised: "You can't find it again."

The King’s Speech is the first film to portray my speech defect realistically, says novelist David Mitchell.