The Muppets do Bohemian Rhapsody
• Annie Proulx does not appreciate your Brokeback Mountain slash fic.
• Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones wins the 2009 Bad Sex in Fiction award! QUOTE: “I came suddenly, a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg.”
• “I come to bury Caesar, not big him up” – Or; why the use of slang fails to make old literature relevant.
• Romanian spy-cum-insurance salesman tells newspaper that Nobel-prize winning author Herta Muller “has a psychosis, and has no contact with external reality” before admitting that he did, in fact, both wiretap and interrogate her during her stint as a school teacher under Ceausescu’s communist dictatorship. But only once…
• “It’s like carrying around something which is simply wrongly weighted for a book, a hefty dead cormorant or some such.” The Guardian reviews Stephen King’s Under the Dome.
• “There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money, either.”
• BBC National Short Story Award has an all-female shortlist. Sexist?
• The WSJ looks at the rise and rise of the ghost writer.
• “Books are having their iPod moment this holiday season. But buyer beware: It could also turn out to be an eight-track moment.”
