- Jay Matthews shares his efforts to learn Chinese, prompted in part by this Asia Society report which describes how Americans can learn the Chinese language effort more effectively.
- If you haven’t been receiving David Abrams’ reports from Iraq (which because of a variety of reasons, including a book deal, have only been sent by email), the Tireless Dan Wickett alerts us that one of Abrams’ excerpts is now publicly available through the EWN blog. Abrams is a fellow January Magazine contributor and his memoirs are reminiscent of Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead in their brutal honesty.
- This relates in part to our next installment of the Bat Segundo Show, which we hope to post tonight, but “morning sickness” may be as ignoble as the notion of “hysteria” applied to women during the Victorian era.
- Marilynne Robinson and Kevin Boyle have won the Chicago Tribune Heartland awards. Here’s hoping that the incomparable Golden Rule Jones will offer copious coverage of the Chicago Humanities Festival.
- Online Satanic newscasts? Are today’s online publicists getting desperate or is this innovation?
- Heather Covington chronicles the Harlem Book Fair.
- The Boston Globe has the skinny on the National Book Club Conference.
- Ebony/Jet founder Marian Anderson gets a Washington Post profile.
- A short talk with J. Robert Lennon over at Dogmatika. His next book is described as “a literary police procedural.”
- The boatyard that inspired by Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogyis on thin ice.
- And Frances Dinkelspiel describes what it’s like to research at the California Historical Society.