- Beware the horrible popunders that come with this link, but this news site is reporting that Haruki Murakami’s manuscript collection, which include a handwritten translation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Ice Palace,” are being sold to secondhand bookstores and the Internet. There’s also an accusation against a former editor!
- Joan Didion wins another award. An architect has been commissioned to add an “Award Room” to the Didion compound.
- Proving that the Booker Prize is something of a joke (or perhaps to inure the award against someone as cool as John Banville winning), Fiona “Aunt Petunia” Shaw is a judge this year. The Booker Prize Foundation is still in negotiations with Daniel Craig to see if he can be coaxed to show up to the ceremony in an Aston Martin.
- Greenspan to write about “the infleunce of his mentor.” And you kids thought I was joking about the sex stories!
- Early word on DeLillo’s Game 6. It’s good!
- This week’s bullshit headline syllogism: Grief led to novelist’s best-seller success. Well, okay then, color me grief-stricken!
- Who was John Fante?
- Gray Lady outsources to AP for pivotal anatomical details: “The article also omitted credit for a description of Anna Nicole Smith, a former Playboy model who married Mr. Marshall 14 months before he died. The quotations and the physical description were all supplied by The Associated Press.”
- A new Ezra Pound exhibit.
- Dickens’ Healing Power Keeps Middle-Aged Man In Chair for Photo.
- And perhaps most importantly, Canadian literature finally gets some respect.