Betting Big

The American Writers Museum, until this point nothing more than an idea floating around the mind of its board members, now has a concept plan laid out in a lovely 32-page booklet (pdf).

Kelly Barnhill, author of The Girl Who Drank the Moon, is the winner of this year’s Newbery Medal for “most outstanding contribution to children’s literature,” and Javaka Steptoe, author of Radiant Child: The Story of Young Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, won this year’s Caldecott Medal.

And then there was you: the Oxford English Dictionary is soliciting public help in tracking down “a mysterious, possibly pornographic, 19th-century book from which a number of its quotations are derived.”

The Morning News continues its Reading Roulette series with Nikolai Klimontovich’s “How to Crow Your Head Off,” which “recalls 1957, when another anticipated influx of foreigners into the heart of the Soviet Union prompted ‘municipal cleansing’ measures of the human sort.”