Happy Birthday, Lord Byron

“[H]is authentic education as a reader began not while he was a history major at N.Y.U. or working at a literary agency in Manhattan but at the Green Haven Correctional Facility, in Stormville, New York. There, he offered, he had read a thousand and forty-six books.” Alex Halberstadt writes about “A Prisoner’s Reading List” for The New Yorker. It’s available online, and soon a lot more New Yorker articles will be too.

With the Ender’s Game movie approaching, critics of Orson Scott Card are drawing attention to the writer’s anti-gay rhetoric. In protest of his position, they compelled DC Comics to scrap a Card-penned Superman comic and started a movement to boycott the upcoming movie. In New York Magazine, Kyle Buchanan runs through the nitty-gritty of the controversy, which includes a recent statement from Card that the repeal of DOMA means “the gay marriage issue” is now “moot.” (You might also want to read our interview with Card from back in May.)

“For about 15 years, every time I had a really good dance party that went late, with people lolling around drunk and exhausted, at about 2 a.m., I would hand out paper and ask everyone to draw a vomiting cat. . . . I ended up with an incredibly thick file of drawings, some by people who went on to be published cartoonists and writers.” The New York Times reports that (Year in Reading alum) Jonathan Lethem has sold his papers to Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, a trove that includes comic books, manuscript drafts, notes, letters, and yes, drawings of vomiting cats. You can read our review of Lethem’s Dissident Gardens, which may or may not feature hairballs in a crucial plot point, here.