• 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.

• Mountain Goats meets Lethem and Moody.
• Becoming Jane: the next Shakespeare in Love?
• The Onion: “I can write 600 words about anything.”
• Elisabeth Bumiller is taking a leave of absence from the New York Times to write a Condoleeza Rice bio. The working title: Betrayal is Easy, It’s the Legs That Take Work.
• Actor Louis Zorich thinks Chekhov has more humanity than Shakespeare. After all, there’s more heart in saying “nuclear wessels” than “If music be the food of love, play on.”
• The latest ridiculous deal: Alan Greenspan’s memoir for $7 million. The hell of it is that it’s all riding on a ten-page proposal. For that kind of advance, you’d think Greenspan would extend the proposal by at least twenty pages. If I were publishing the memoir, I’d demand details! Perhaps a chapter devoted to a spry young Greenspan shacking it up with Ayn Rand for a night of wild animalistic sex. That’s what people buy memoirs for.
• When a teenager has a “porn problem,” he’s taken aside by his parents for a stern but frank talk about sexuality. Alas, Google is no teenager. It’s a major company — indeed, one might argue, an orphan. So instead of the talk, some folks are suing them.
• I believe this was reported first at Maud’s, but the New York Public Library is purchasing William S. Burroughs’ archive. Among the acquisitions: An aborted attempt at a novel called Naked Lunch II: Naked Dinner. Of course, all those large plastic bags filled with randomly snipped text are going to be a bitch and a half for all those unpaid interns to log.
• Centuries later, folks are still arguing over how Shakespeare died. Some say a tumor over the left eye. Some say that the Bard suffered a delayed midlife crisis and attempted to shadow fence himself, with unfortunate mortal consequences. The more eccentric experts, however, suggest that Shakespare actually didn’t die at all and that his body was frozen in a primitive form of cryogenics. This last possibility was apparently where Walt Disney got the idea from.
• People are taking Atwood’s signing device pretty damn seriously.
• A paean to great sportswriting.
• Transcript of Arthur Miller grilled during the McCarthy era.
• RIP Linda Smith.
• The Thomas Wolfe Memorial in Asheville will be getting the Book TV treatment.
• La Haggis has a rememberance of Frederick Busch.
• Can you dig it?

Apologies for the roundup. It’s a very crazy day here. More long-form posts tomorrow.

• J.B. MacKinnnon wins the $25,000 Charles Taylor Prize.
• Aimee Bender: “The short story is an older form than the novel. Like the fairy tale, you could tell the short story in one sitting. The short story doesn’t go away. There’s no chance of it. It’s part of breathing. It’s like asking, will poetry go away? Never!”
• Who is that fat novelist bastard? Alexei Sayle, of course!
• Robert Birnbaum: On Notice.
• A Pasadena-centric rememberance of Octavia Butler.
• Tayari asks: “If you love a writer, let her know!” Love forthcoming for future post on this end.
• Neil Jordan as struggling novelist.
• Toni Morrison on writing operas.
• Nora Roberts has signed a deal with Lifetime Television. The real question here is why such an inevitable development was so late in coming.
• A brief writeup of a recent Edward Jones lecture.
• Nicole Kidman has an ego? Who would have thought?
• A rave review for Daniel Handler’s Adverbs.
• This won’t mean anything if you didn’t grow up watching Superfriends, but Legions of Gotham has scored an interview with the voice of El Dorado.
• Samuel Beckett’s centenary is happening this April. Maud has more.
• Tom Wolfe “will speak at 11 a.m. on the Lawn.” The University of Virginia tried offering Wolfe a regular lawn, but Wolfe insisted on a proper noun.
• And did Sliver really need to be released on DVD?

• Jeeves is officially being retired from Ask Jeeves, presumably because paying out a licensing fee to the estate of P.G. Wodehouse was too much of a prohibitive cost. The new site is utterly bland without the literary butler.
• Reports from Comic-Con have trickled in: USA Today, GalleyCat, and many panel reports from Newsarama. Also, a Spawn/Batman crossover is in the works.
• Jeffrey Archer, a hack novelist known for prison time and pointing out the bleeding obvious, has acknowledged that his political career is over.
• Betsy Retallack has found an unusual poetic inspiration: her husband’s obsession with junky cars. The success of her first poetry collection has inspired a second book, Whither the Axle My Sweet Love Gutted for Me from the Yard?
• Is Vollmann’s Copernicus book “an onslaught of taxing concepts expressed in an often wearying style?” Or did Dava Sobel simply not take the time to parse the text? This kind of book reviewing defense/copout seems reminiscent of other prodigious authors.
• To read and possibly respond to later: James Wood on realist fiction. (Thanks, David!)
• Keith Gessen on Russian writer Vasily Grossman.
• Today is Paul Auster Day in Brooklyn. (via Jeff)
• Lev Grossman continues to demonstrate his irrelevance by asking E.L. Doctorow 10 questions that seem to have been prepared in 3 minutes. (via Mark)
• An IHT article on British small presses: are they better than the big guns?
• Are polished podcasts better? (via LHB)
• Dan Wickett plans to read a short story, a poem or an essay every day and comment upon it. Apparently, he got the idea from this interesting blog.

• Scott Sigler‘s Earthcore is the first “podcast only” novel. For $9.99, you can download all 20 episodes. The original novel was published by Dragon Moon Press, which, while styling itself a “traditional publisher,” is in the habit of not paying its authors an advance. Eight Ball says “Glorified Vanity Press? All Signs Point to Yes.”
• Michael Crichton: global warming expert for the Bush administration? If so, it’s good to see our government consulting novelists to determine public policy. Personally, I’m hoping Bush can meet with Erica Jong, so that our sheltered manboy president might become acquainted with the “zipless fuck.”
• A good friend and I have been discussing the forthcoming release of Basic Instinct 2. Between the constant references to the first film (“Ever fucked on cocaine, Ed?” reads one email subject line; “You wanna play? Come on!” reads mine in return), we’re wondering two things: (1) Will this film help to make older women sexier? (If so, huzzah!) (2) Isn’t this film a few years too late (like, say, a decade) to be riding on the coattails of the first film? Well, it appears that even the film’s advertisers don’t know how to market the film properly. Come on, Columbia. Surely you can be more explicit about why people are planning to see this film.
• John Gregory Dunne: worthy nonfiction writer?
• Give Kinky Friedman props for the world’s goofiest bumpersticker, although I would have selected, “There’s a Little Bit of Kinky In All of Us.”
• Richard Flanagan, political crusader.
• An Elizabeth Browning exhibition is going down at the British Library.
• If you’re a writer, Zoetrope Virtual Studio sounds like a bad cross between fan fiction and American Idol. Apparently, one is not permitted to be “mean” (read: offering honest, ball-busting advice which might actually help a writer to advance in his craft) to other writers. If you want to be a serious writer, why bother with this nonsense? If you need that kind of affirmation, enter a county fair or join a twelve-step support group instead.
• Dai Smith offers 10 Welsh alternatives to Dylan Thomas.
• Do the Canadians have an answer to J.K. Rowling?
• Jeff has the goods on a Hold Steady show. Unfortunately, the Hold Steady (a band highly endorsed by Return of the Reluctant!) didn’t make their way through San Francisco. But word on the street is that one Tito Perez somehow managed to see them.

• Georgia fundies won’t be able to enjoy their tax-free Bible purchases anymore. (via the new and improved Book Ninja)
• T.C. Boyle’s Talk Talk, not even out yet, is being turned into a movie. (via Manly Man)
• Ed Falco himself is on deck today at the LBC. Do be sure to ask him questions.
• Just when you thought Leo “When I Need You” Sayer had served his purpose and disappeared from the face of the earth (well, only to torture you over the speakers during a late-night Denny’s meal), the 70s pop song falsetto now fancies himself a novelist. The protagonist? A musician, of course. “[A]ll the people I would have loved to have been.”
• Richard Russo, tax incentive booster?
• Working an STD booth: the source of poetic inspiration.
• What the hell? Who killed Curious George co-writer Alan Shellack? Why would anyone want to kill a man who wrote pleasant stories about monkeys?
• Good news: The Electric Company is on DVD. Bad news: Dave Eggers wrote the liner notes.
• Bill Nye: no longer a bachelor.
• B on illicit file sharing.

• Birnbaum Alert (x2): He talks with Rick Moody and pulls a Glenn Gould and interviews himself.
• Novelist Philip Hensher is not happy with the British Royal Opera’s staging of Ballo in Maschera. It seems that the performers were rehearsing in blackface. Hensher’s full thoughts can be found here. The Royal Opera has stopped wearing blackface. (On a somewhat related note, Harold Ramis has turned dark.)
• I didn’t know this, but apparently Anne Rice’s sudden conversion was because of a diabetic coma.
• Kurt Anderson + Catherine Zeta-Jones = Recipe for Disaster?
• Some recent words on Republicans from Z.Z. Packer.
• Utopian literature: a dying breed?
• This season’s hot motif: deaths of the rich and famous?
• The latest angle for a blogging article: bloggers as major political players. What next? A Masonic handshake?
• Jeremy Mercer gets the Newsweek treatment.
• Lynn Johnson’s “For Better or For Worse,” the only comic strip that has featured characters growing up in real time (and dared to tackle homosexuality) , is ending next year. (via Komickcast)
• Sam and Jim Go to Hollywood (via Splinters)
• The George Plimpton Project: Click George to Enter.
• Romeo and Juliet: told in emoticons.

• Bush and Alberto Gonzales have now come out for greater coyright laws. Gonzales wants serious jail time for intellectual property offenders. But what he isn’t telling you is that, in light of the fact that he advocates torture, he wants to throw all teenagers who downloaded last week’s episode of The O.C. into a CIA-funded gulag. We all know who the real criminals are, don’t we?
• A.L. Kennedy didn’t exactly kill at the comedy club. (via ElegVar)
• For fuck’s sake, please stop giving Danielle Steel money.
• So are these folks in Reno really turning to self-publishing because they can’t wait two years? Or because they are amateurs who fear rejection?
• Chinua Achebe has called for Nigeria to speak in its mother tongue, preaching against “language colonialism.”
• Proving that the Welsh often come up with batshit crazy ideas, there is now a 3D talking head of Dylan Thomas reading “Do not go gentle into that good night” on loop. It was employed during the Dylan Thomas Festival. The idea apparently was that a bigass talking head would somehow get young people more excited about poetry. However, great attention was paid to Thomas’s facial niceties. Too bad that there isn’t any video online.

• Matthew Cheney reports on this year’s World Fantasy Convention.
• This Space suggests that Michel Houellebecq’s work has “a decorum as studied as any Edwardian novel” and compares House of Mirth against Atomized.
• Has Oprah turned into Geraldo? The Book Standard reports that Terry McMillan will confront her gay ex-husband on today’s show.
• Another plagiarism case: this time, it involves filmmaker Deepa Mehta pilfering from journalist Anuradha Dutta.
• William T. Vollmann has a great way to make a lot of cash in six hours. (via Tito Perez)
• Tod Goldberg notes that the Los Angeles Times has picked up on the Koontz racist remarks story. Apparently, Bantam Dell has been receiving feedback on what Koontz said and Lee Goldberg and Koontz talked on the phone, without apparent success. Meanwhile, Koontz is claiming that the remarks involved “some political incorrectness, but nothing mean.” Tod Goldberg concludes, “Whatever the case may be, I suspect saying, ‘Sorry if I offended anyone, it certainly wasn’t my intention’ would have been a far better response than, ‘You’re all out to get me!'”

• Amardeep Singh reflects on Amrita Pratim.
• Microsoft is scanning the British Library.
• As if a film division wasn’t enough, Random House has responded to the Google Print flap with an e-book micropayment plan. HarperCollins has followed suit.
• Jenny Davidson has the skinny on Lethem’s MIT appearance.
• Jeff’s also participating in NaDruWriNi tomorrow night. This is quite generous of him, as someone is going to have to keep Pinky, Gwenda and me in check.
• The Top 100 DJS of 2005. Sadly, Dr. Johnny Fever didn’t make the list.
• Apparently, William Burroughs made a few short films.
• Chinua Achebe says it’s no big deal if oral storytelling dies out. Oral sex, on the other hand…
• Alan Moore talks about magic and porn. In other words, the usual stuff.
• A new one-man play from Gareth Armstrong called Shylock offers a new take on Shakespeare’s notorious character. Will Fagin be next?
• Alan Hollinghurst: upstaged by the White Sox.
• Murakami at Tufts. (via M.A.O.)
• Scribbling Woman explains the benefits of blogging.
• And, for tomorrow evening, a handy list of NaDruWriNi participants.

It’s a very hectic afternoon, so here’s a quick roundup:

• Rambling African Geek has initiated a series of lengthy posts concerning race and science fiction. He argues that, outside of invasion locales, science fiction authors have failed to paint a portrait of Africa and that he is “virtually invisible to the perceived SF mainstream, which is overwhelmingly white, hetero, male and only interested in stories by and about other white hetero males.”
• Obvious headline of the week: Blogging moves into mainstream. I guess news travels slower in Ohio.
• At long last, Jonathan Coe has completed The Closed Circle, the sequel to The Rotters’ Club.
• Galleycat reports that Peter Gethers, the “creative genius” who unleashed Kate & Allie will be heading some motion picture entity called “Random House Films.”
• Apparently, Margaret Atwood isn’t the only one writing about Penelope. Children’s novelist Adèle Geras also has a book coming out.
• In Australia, it looks like a new antiterrorism law could have a major effect on the definition of “sedition,” which may affect an Aussie novelist’s freedom of expression.
• A Gore Vidal biography is making the rounds.
• The BBC notes that there’s only one work of fiction on the Guardian’s First Book Award list.
• Tangerine Muumuu is doing the NaNoWriMo. Some years ago, I publicly posted a NaNoWriMo effort in process. Unfortunately, I was prevented from completing the extremely weird Oedipal narrative that resulted due to my apartment catching on fire. I wish her well.
• And speaking of aborted creative efforts, Quiddity reports that Terry Gilliam is reviving The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Maybe.

• Indian author Amrita Pritam has died.
• The Times profiles John Banville.
• An early review of Michael Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy adaptation.
• Seth interviewed about Wimbledon Green.
• Three C.S. Lewis bios compared.

• NaNoWriMo (not to be confused with NaDruWriNi, which we’ll be participating in this Saturday) begins today. Among the participants: Pete Anderson.
• It looks like 2006 will offer the return of Darren Aronofsky. Aside from directing an episode of Lost and overseeing the release of the years-in-production The Fountain, Aronofsky is in negotiations to direct Shannon Burke’s as-yet-unpublished novel, Black Flies.
• More on Lewis Libby as a novelist from Der Spiegel: Apparently, he composed such passages as “One of her breasts now hung loosely in his hand near his face and he knew not how best to touch her.” If Libby isn’t a shoe-in for some kind of postdated Bad Sex Award, then I don’t know who is.
• This may be the most frightening Guinness world record ever: L. Ron Hubbard is the world’s most translated author.
• Rebecca Traister weighs in on chick lit. She goes one step further than anyone who participated in yesterday’s interesting discussion, suggesting that today’s chick lit is recording women’s history.
• More on Anthony Burgess from the Belfast Telegraph.
• The Austin-American Statesman reports on the Texas Book Festival.
• The fall of indie publishing? (via Jeff)
• And Scott Turow considers himself a war novelist these days. No seriously.

• We’re not in New York, but if you are, Emily Gordon points us to a Katrina benefit going down this Sunday at some place called Camaje.
• Again, we’re not in New York, but if we were, then we’d definitely check out “The Jonathan Ames Show” going down on October 25 at a place called Mo Pitkin’s. Tickets can be found here. Photos of previous show can be found here.
• We’re not in Chicago either, but Golden Rule Jones points to the Chicago International Film Festival, which starts today.
• Neither are we in Los Angeles, but, lo and behold, we’d be remiss Mr. Sarvas notes that Wendy Lesser will be reading at Three Lives tonight at 7PM.
• We’re not even in Boston, and yet, there it is happening again, Jonathan Lethem on November 3.
• We are in San Francisco, and we can tell you, based on last Saturday’s Litquake experience, that Robert Coover is every bit as charming a reader as he is a writer. He is adorably small and has a voice somewhere between Wallace Shawn and Bob Wilkins, which he employs to great effect during a reading. But the McSweeney’s people should be ashamed for not giving one of the great pomo pioneers so much as a bottle of water for a one hour reading.

• Mr. Rake spends an evening with Zadie Smith.
• Robert “Two Sheds” Birnbaum gets busy with Stuart Dybek.
• Haggis holds a contest.
• For a morning roundup, this is looking very much like one of those dastardly Mouseketeer Club intros. So I’ll cop and fess that, despite the fact that while these are all links worthy of your attention, the motivation, the raison d’etre as it were, for this post is to tell the world that yes I am indeed alive and to fulfill the basic obligation, which is at least one post a day. The idea being that if I were to miss a day, you (the audience and concerned friends) would conclude that there was something wrong: that I had jumped off a ledge or checked into a monastery or registered as a Republican. Of course, if one were to simply declare one’s self alive, this would not be of much interest (“I’m alive! Boo yah! How you like them apples?”), as it would not fulfill the basic requisite, which is to cover literary happenings or things of related interest. So instead I’ll conclude as gracefully as I can and report that I’m quite, quite, quite busy (nothing wrong, mind you, just highly diligent!) and I’ll try to check in with something thoughtful later, don’t know where, don’t know when.

• Over at Beatrice, Emily Gordon covers the New Yorker. J-Franz and J-Updike make cameo appearances.
• Laila Lalami meets Salman Rushdie and gets an unexpected surprise.
• John Leonard returns momentarily to the NYTBR to offer thoughts on James Agee (in our view, one of the finest film critics of the 20th century).
• More Banville interview to come over at Mark’s.

• Scott Esposito has initiated The Quarterly Conversation, a collection of reviews, thoughts and interviews that Mr. Esposito plans to serve up every quarter.
• A fifteen year old girl has received the Bungei Award, making her the youngest winner or this Japanese award for newcomers. Her identity has been kept secret, presumably to ward off the depraved hentai enthusiasts.
• The Globe and Mail chats with Doug Coupland. Now he seems to be getting inspiration from the likes of B.S. Johnson (or perhaps something substance-based): “You take the book, and you remove the pages and soak them in a Tupperware container and then you chew the pages one at a time. I always did it when I was watching TV.” Some folks call this snacking. Others might call it self-indulgent navel-gazing. Coupland calls it novel-writing.
• The New York Times, about as desperate for readers these days as a parched refugee waiting for FEMA, will add comics and other doodads to its Sunday magazine. Of course, since it involves Chris Ware, it can’t be completely discounted. But the real question is whether this means the end for Deborah Solomon and Randy Cohen?
• Most predictable literary news of the week: “Brando’s pulp fiction wallow goes overboard.” You don’t say?
• Pope John Paul II wrote a one-act play called “The Silversmith’s Shop.” Apparently, it will be staged in October. The play was written when the late Pope was known as the Bishop of Krakow and concludes that “Love is no adventure. It has its own specific burden.” Perhaps the late Pope’s rather adventureless approach to love might be one of the reasons he got into the Catholic racket.
• Richard Ford and Anne Rice on losing New Orleans.
• Orhan Pamuk faces a potential three years in jail for “publicly denigrating Turkish identity” — in other words, daring to tell the truth about the 1915 Armenian massacre.
• An update on Zoe Heller.
• Salman Rushdie has declared celebrity a curse. Offering proof, Mr. Rushdie pointed to a person following him with a small Rushdie effigy and several pins.