Edward Champion's Return of the Reluctant

Roundup

• Cory Doctorow's Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, a very nutty-looking novel about Alan, the son of a mountain and a washing machine, is, like Cory's other books, available for download under a Creative Commons license.
• Well beyond the war over "chick lit" (a term that, as far as I'm concerned, refers to those tasty square blocks of gum rather than books) is the more visible war over "women's fiction." Elizabeth Berg is the latest to complain.
• In an unfortunate scenario straight out of Nicholson Baker's Double Fold, Matthew J. Bruccoli has put out a $1,000 reward for missing volumes of the Pottsville Journal between 1924 and 1926. On those microfilms are John O'Hara's early newspaper work. Bruccoli believes that Gibbsville, O'Hara's infamous town modeled after Pottsville, was formed in this early journalism.
• An NYU academic claims to have figured out how "The Waste Land" was written. Even stranger, it involves the FBI.