- Daniel Olivas interviews Salvador Plascencia.
- Lev Grossman on the Ian McEwan mess: “The disparity between the greatness of McEwan’s achievement and the pettiness of this complaint is vertiginous. That McEwan even bothered to answer the charges is gobsmacking.”
- Five novels for your inner drunk. (via Books Inq.)
- 75 Books? Try committing 100 poems to memory over a year. (via Bookninja)
- Terry Teachout, “In the Mood.”
- Just when you thought the Madonna adoption flap couldn’t get any more ridiculous, it goes into overdrive.
- Occasional Superheroine: an essential blog chronicling women’s issues in comics, as experienced by former DC/Valiant editor Valerie D’Orazio. (via The Beat)
- Pirate illustrations from Patricia Storms.
- Chasing Ray has kickstarted a series looking into books about writing.
- The Zuckerman Cycle will come to an end.
- George Saunders on Borat.
- Michael Allen on page layout.
- If you haven’t been reading Derik Badman‘s series, “Rethinking Transitions,” comic makers take note.
- The justice system works! (via Syntax of Things)
- Everything you could possibly want to know about Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn.
- Wondering how you can maneuver your way onto the Costa shortlist? Try cancer.
- What goes on at Beatrice Monti’s writers colony?
- Man, poor Ngugi wa Thiong’o just can’t get a break. In addition to the Vitale incident, four guys tried to rob him a few years ago in Nairobi.
- No surprise. On the book digitizing front, Yahoo doesn’t like Google.
- Kevin Sampsell devises new literary terms. This sounds suspiciously similar to the Literary Hipster’s Handbook!
- Adam Rogers eavesdrops on BSG‘s writers. (via Locus)
- Jenny Davidson’s “The Other Amazon.”
- Professor Fury’s “Songs I Couldn’t Get Out of My Head in 2006.”
Talk about a veritable cyberlynching. First Gawker, now Kevin Sampsell.
I love the roundup posts. One-stop shopping.
Saunders jumps the shark in that Shouts & Murmmurs piece. For a guy who writes funny stuff himself, the piece looks like the work of a humorless tool. I first saw it linked (approvingly) on the National Review website, which is a bad sign for ol’ George.
“gobsmacking” — hmph