“Everywhere I go, I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”

- Flannery O’Connor

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CanadianBusiness.com reviews three books to help you get more from your healthcare, pick good stocks, and grant you nothing short of the recipe for happiness.

Dystopia as only 1952 could see it - BTC revisits Vonnegut and Pohl/Kornbluth in a compare and contrast of PIANO PLAYER and THE SPACE MERCHANTS.

Advance reviews of Andrew Davidson’s, THE GARGOYLE, are proclaiming this debut novel as the next big thing.

Anne McLean’s translation of Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s tale of Bogota, THE INFORMERS, is well-received over at The Independent.

And a trail of bread and cigarette crumbs leads one writer to a great old book.

The playwright discusses theater with Charlie Rose:

Joyce Carol Oates enters “tabloid hell” in newest novel.

Salman Rushdie ruminates on his artistic roots.

Professor Daniel Izevbaye discusses the fate of Nigerian literature in the 21st Century in a Q&A at All Africa.

Max Holland’s 12 year (and counting) obsession with his Kennedy assassination book.

Can poetry be a war crime?

“What we find in books is like the fire in our hearths. We fetch it from our neighbor’s, we kindle it at home, we communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.”

- Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet)

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Interesting to see a new review of the decade old smash hit (and one of my own all-time favorite books) THE POISONWOOD BIBLE. Apparently it showed the reviewer the difference between the Dan Browns and the Barbara Kingsolvers of the world. A convert is born, perhaps.

Retread ground in Bill Cotter and Bill Young’s, THE 1964-1965 WORLD’S FAIR: CREATION AND LEGACY, but not without its own high points.

Ha! CAR AUDIO FOR DUMMIES as reviewed by the gang at cnet, who find it nifty and handy.

And Library Journal has a shelf-load of new fiction to peruse.

While digging around for some Dorothy Parker clips today (see below), I was pleasantly surprised to find The Dorothy Parker Society, which offers an astounding variety of media devoted to the author.

Most surprisingly, the site features 35 recordings made by Ms. Parker of her writings, in addition to a handful of videos related to her life and work.

From the site description:

Dorothy Parker made two full-length LP recordings of her work in 1964. A record company, Verve, asked her to read her poems and stories for a record called The World of Dorothy Parker (Verve V-15029). Her other LP is from Spoken Arts called An Informal Hour with Dorothy Parker (Spoken Arts 726). It is the best of the two: Parker reads more than two dozen of her favorite poems. It is from the latter that most of these audio clips are taken.

At the time of the recording sessions, Mrs. Parker was approaching age 71. Her voice ravaged by years of Chesterfields and Johnny Walker, this offers a peek at the real Mrs. Parker. She died three years after recording her work.

Special thanks to Jon Bradley Snyder of Spokane, WA, and Catherine Chodack of New Jersey for loaning me recordings of these 2 LPs. Note: The NAACP owns the copyright to these recordings, so copying them for commercial use or performance is prohibited.

The recordings require Real Player. If you don’t already have it, you can download the free player here.

Jennifer Jason Leigh recites the poet’s work “A Well-Worn Story” in her masterful performance in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle:

 
In April, in April,
My one love came along,
And I ran the slope of my high hill
To follow a thread of song.

His eyes were hard as porphyry
With looking on cruel lands;
His voice went slipping over me
Like terrible silver hands.

Together we trod the secret lane
And walked the muttering town.
I wore my heart like a wet, red stain
On the breast of a velvet gown.

In April, in April,
My love went whistling by,
And I stumbled here to my high hill
Along the way of a lie.

Now what should I do in this place
But sit and count the chimes,
And splash cold water on my face
And spoil a page with rhymes?

Guardian book blogger Charlotte Stretch examines the “page 69″ rule of picking a good novel.

Bright Lights, Big City author Jay McInerney to resurface with a cameo on Gossip Girl.

Boise Weekly takes a look back at the life of the late poet William Studebaker, through his own words.

Some ‘Top 10′ blasts from the past, courtesy of the Guardian:

- John Burnside’s Top 10 Scottish Poetry Collections

- Colum McCann’s Top 10 Novels on Poets

- Terence Blacker’s Top 10 Tales of Literary Villainy

- Nick Brooks’ Top 10 Literary Murderers 

“To know that no one before you has seen an organ you are examining, to trace relationships that have occurred to no one before, to immerse yourself in the wondrous crystalline world of the microscope, where silence reigns, circumscribed by its own horizon, a blindingly white arena — all this is so enticing that I cannot describe it.”

- Vladimir Nabokov

ColoradoGuy over at the Absolute Write Water Cooler is shepherding an interesting thread, spun off of this Times piece (which is, in turn, spun off the actual books reviewed therein, of course) on the endurance and evolution of humor through the ages of civilization.

Good stuff for pranksters and pedants alike, and definitely worth a perusal.

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Another casualty in the war of the relevance of print book reviews - The LA Times looks to discontinue their Sunday book review section.

But on their newsblog, The LA Times did have a fun article questioning a few book critics on whether they ever regretted a review they’d given.

The CBBC reviews Bear Grylls’, GOLD OF THE GODS. Is it good news when the author’s name is bigger than anything else on the cover?

Here’s a title sure to send my carpal tunnel singing - deep breath, here we go - THE LAST REAL SEASON: A HILARIOUS LOOK BACK AT 1975 WHEN MAJOR LEAGUERS MADE PEANUTS, THE UMPIRES WORE RED, AND BILLY MARTIN TERRORIZED EVERYONE. Phew. It’s about baseball and The National Sports Review didn’t love it.

The top ten books on ventriloquism. No, seriously.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s courtship of Zelda Sayre:

Neil Powell takes on Kingsley and Martin Amis in a critical biography, and Peter Craven (writing for The Age) deems it “silly and sickening”.

The Guardian’s Stuart Evers laments the absence of Bernard Malamud from the current literary scene.

Del Rey Books and Epic Games join forces to produce Gears of War trilogy.

Google to host Bengali literary works and classic films.

R.I.P. Nancy Burdick Galbraith

“My instinct as an individualist and artist has always warned me most urgently against this capacity of men for becoming drunk on collective suffering, collective pride, collective hatred, and collective honor. When this morbid exaltation becomes perceptible in a room, a hall, a village, a city, or a country, I grow cold and distrustful; a shudder comes over me, for already, while most of my fellow men are still weeping with rapture and enthusiasm, still cheering and venting protestations of brotherhood, I see blood flowing and cities going up in flames.”

- Hermann Hesse

Dr. Peter Whitehouse’s new book, THE MYTH OF ALZHEIMERS: WHAT YOU AREN’T BEING TOLD ABOUT TODAY’S MOST DREADED DIAGNOSIS, looks at brain aging in a new old way.

America’s efforts at nation building take a hit from Ahmed Rashid with his book, DESCENT INTO CHAOS and the opednews.com takes its own shots.

Some books will float on their titles alone. DISHING WITH THE KITCHEN VIRGIN sounds like it happens to be as good fun as it should be.

The Economist reviews BOTTLEMANIA: HOW WATER WENT ON SALE AND WHY WE BOUGHT IT and finds it thorough.

A reading of Auden’s poem, “The Unknown Citizen”:

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be

One against whom there was no official complaint,

And all the reports on his conduct agree

That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint

For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.

Except for the War till the day he retired

He worked in a factory and never got fired,

But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.

Yet he wasn’t a scab or odd in his views,

For his Union reports that he paid his dues,

(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)

And our Social Psychology workers found

That he was Popular with his mates and liked to drink.

The Press are convinced that he bought a Paper every day

And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.

Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured

And his Health-card shows he was once in a hospital but left it cured,

Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare

He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Installment Plan

And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,

A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.

Our researchers into Public Opinion are content

That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;

When there was peace he was for peace when there was war he went.

He was married and and added five children to the population,

Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation,

And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.

Was he free? Was he Happy? The question is absurd:

Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

More on Annie Barrows and her completion of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society following the death of her aunt (previously reported in Afternoon Viewing).

Four handwritten suicide notes by Japanese novelist Ryunosuke Akutagawa recovered.

The Welsh Assembly Government’s New York office launches walking tour to celebrate Dylan Thomas’ New York experiences.

James McMurtry, son of famed writer Larry, discusses the literary and character-driven aspects of his songwriting with the L.A. Times.

The New York Times devotes 9 pages to David Carr’s The Night of the Gun excerpt.

“Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.”

- James Joyce

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If writing what you know comes from the cusp of celebrity, why name drop in your thinly disguised memoir-as-novel when The New York Times will do it for you?

Two thrillers and a soldier’s tale from the Oregon Register-Guard.

And Seacoastonline.com offers up two warm reviews for books about animals.

CNN dubs Rick Perlstein’s, NIXONLAND, ‘paranoid’.

And one more comic rounds out the night - a glowing review of the last installment of Y:THE LAST MAN from Salon.