Salon explores the new book by artist Suze Rotolo, who recounts her years as Bob Dylan’s girlfriend and muse for four years in the early 60s.

Perhaps jaded by the (warranted) suspicions of opportunism that are near-reflexive in our age of constant auto-exploitation, Stephanie Zacharek seems prepared to find a salacious tell-all in A Freewheelin’ Time and is, instead, pleasantly surprised:

This is about as far from a juicy tell-all as a memoir can get: Rotolo does share some private details of the story of her romance with Dylan — the two met in 1961, when Rotolo was 17 and Dylan was 20, and were a couple for some four years — but her approach is so sensitive, discreet and affectionate that she never comes off as opportunistic. This is an honest book about a great love affair, set against the folk music revival of the early 1960s, but its sense of time and place is so vivid that it’s also another kind of love story: one about a very special pocket of New York, in the days when impoverished artists, and not just supermodels, could afford to live there.

Check out the entire article here.

Rediscovered 1938 novel finds new life on the silver screen.

Country duo Brooks and Dunn transform their liner notes alter egos into crime novel characters—with a little help from humorist Bill Fitzhugh.

BBC program depicts a very different Jane Austen.

Homeless poet loses body of work to thieves.

Parents of missing child to tell their side of the story—through a ghost writer.

“A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fastened a halter, but which now you can’t catch. It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room. You enter its room with bravura, holding a chair at the thing and shouting, “Simba!”"

- Annie Dillard

Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It (mentioned here before) gets the Chicken Little treatment from The Sunday Times.

The Ressurectionist: “as dark as the bottom of a well” as high praise indeed.

The Village Voice’s Michelle Orange dives into Israeli writer Etgar Keret’s short story collection The Girl on the Fridge, finding it an ultimately satisafactory, if uneven, experience.

Stephen Romer’s fourth collection of poetry, Yellow Studio, wins over The Guardian’s Adam Thorpe.

A “polemicist’s vision and a scholar’s patience” drives Germaine Greer’s history of Ann Hathaway in Shakespeare’s Wife.

Huge kudos to the lovely and talented Andrew Sullivan, who (as he so often does) plucked a gem from The Atlantic archives.

Can Poetry Matter? is a 1991 piece by Dana Gioia that exhaustively forecast the increasing incestuousness of the poetry world. She recognized and expertly analyzed the growing trend of verse being ripped from the hands of the everyday reader and, instead, sequestered in the cloistered halls of academia and niche publishing:

AMERICAN POETRY now belongs to a subculture. No longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group. Little of the frenetic activity it generates ever reaches outside that closed group. As a class poets are not without cultural status. Like priests in a town of agnostics, they still command a certain residual prestige. But as individual artists they are almost invisible.

For anyone interested in the pleasure or craft of poetry, the article is highly recommended weekend reading.

From the heart of the Reagan Revolution, director Gus Van Sant’s chilling 1986 short film of William Burroughs reciting his poem Thanksgiving Prayer:

After posting the previous piece (”Why I Write”), it occurred to me how gaudy quotation marks sometimes look. Then I remembered that it was probably because they’re so often misused.

Then I remembered a funny blog I had seen devoted to sloppy and erroneous use of quotation marks. Then I had lunch and forgot about it for a while. Then I remembered and made this post.

Enjoy the “funny”…

The Guardian Book Page offers up a monthly feature probing an eclectic group of writers from around the globe on their motivations, inspiration and influences. April’s installment features crime writer Reginald Hill.

Be sure to check out the entire listing of authors here.

How a ‘Slate’ critic helped save Nabokov’s last novel from destruction. (Related post)

Poets, storytellers and musicians band together to raise money to bring water for life to the Samburu people in Northern Kenya.

The monumental task of scanning every book in the world.

New book on Osama bin Laden looks for clues to his radicalization in family tragedy.

 Bet the cover art is a photo of a trainwreck.

“Do not put statements in the negative form.
And don’t start sentences with a conjunction.
If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a
great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all.
De-accession euphemisms.
If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.”

-William Safire, “Great Rules of Writing”

The fine folks over at the Online Book Page have been busy this month, adding several hundred new titles to their ever-growing catalog of more than 30,000 books.

With links to a healthy mix of literary luminaries and obscure and/or niche works, the Online Book Page is a useful and entertaining resource for both writers and readers.

Oh. And, if you head over, definitely check out Banned Books Online.

I WAS TOLD THERE’D BE CAKE offers slices of wit from the
old-at-being-young/young-at-being-old set.

Jeff Shaara takes on WWII in THE STEEL WAVE: A NOVEL OF WORLD WAR II and if he does it as proud as his American Civil War novels, run, do not walk, to get this one.

IT TAKES A VILLAGE IDIOT takes Entertainment Weekly’s Jim Mullen from the Big Apple to live amongst the regular ole’ apples out on the farm.

THE BITCH IS BACK yanks ‘a certain type of woman’ out of context for a look at literary homage to difficult broads.

Thank goodness the kids aren’t fooled.

I ran across this article on text-speak on the Saint Louis Today website. (Don’t ask. I got lost on my way to TopekaForever dot com.) Astoundingly, people with officious titles would like to argue that thumb-dancing your LOLs and your WHT R U GNG 2 WEARs are legitimate creative writing exercises.

“I think it’s quite exciting to see so much writing going on in any form,” said Richard Sterling, chairman of the advisory board of the National Commission on Writing, which also worked on the study. “It leads people to other parts of the spectrum.”

After I wiped the blood from my eyes, I was pleased to see that there was sense to be had in the article. This made me smile-

“There’s a difference between writing and communicating,” said Matt Carlson, an assistant professor of communications at St. Louis University. “Leaving a voice mail for someone doesn’t make you a great orator.”

As we could have guessed, rampant texting has made an effort out of spelling the words ‘what’ and ‘you’ on homework, but a refreshing seventy-five percent of the youngsters polled admitted that texting and writing were not interchangeable. They know the difference. Quick! Take away their cell phones before they change their minds.

Oh and here. Don’t say I never gave you anything.

A beautifully composed half-hour documentary on Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, provided courtesy of UCTV:

The “whys and wherefores of anonymous publishing throughout the history of English literature”. Fascinating stuff.

A wonderfully astute and engaging piece on poet August Kleinzahler.

Ralph Reed: novelist. Jesus, please come back soon…

Accolades and awe for a 97-year-old first time novelist.

Poetry as therapy for juvenile offenders.

Does size (length?) matter? Mailer penned a 50 page sex scene as a bet with his lover.

“In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.”

- Ernest Hemingway

It’s $45. It’s ancient history. It’s THE LANDMARK HERODOTUS and likely for the specialist. But it’s either really good, or the guy at The New Yorker could sell ice cubes to Eskimos.

And a history a little closer to home - NIXONLAND: THE RISE OF A PRESIDENT AND THE FRACTURING OF AMERICA What is with me today? That sounds good, too.

Alice Hoffman’s 20th novel (20th!) is nothing to sneer off as ‘just romance’ according to The Baltimore Sun.

If this is in the review, you gotta look - Allen begins his story of synthetic fertilizers… Hey, it’s the history of pesticides. It needed to be written. And history seems to be my bag just now.

Tobias Wolff’s new collection of short stories features a timely selection of a boy who tells tall tales as memoir, and Slate reviewed it.

From October 2007: Doris Lessing returns home to find reporters camped out. When they inform her that she’s won the Nobel Prize for Literature (an announcement she missed while out shopping), her reaction is truly classic.

Times Online’s Bryan Appleyard reports on the upcoming publication of Nicholas Baker’s Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, a bewildering history book that concludes that the pacifists were right and that the atrocities of the Nazi regime are more the fault of the warmongering Allies that Hitler himself:

Baker believes that the allies flung aside all possibilities of peace, that Roosevelt deliberately provoked the Japanese, and Churchill inaugurated bombing of civilian populations to provoke Hitler to respond by attacking London and, ultimately, draw America into the war.

Appleyard goes to great lengths to paint a sympathetic picture of Baker, ultimately finding him an “honourable”, if misguided, man:

I’m sure he’s wrong in his belief that, in 1939, pacifism was the better policy; and the idea that we could live with a Nazi Europe in peace is simply implausible. But he’s honourably wrong. He is a gentle, sweet man, wounded by human brutality.

You can judge for yourself next month when the book is released.

Literary fiction gets kinky in Melanie Abrams’ Playing.

Are you “cool-looking, smart-looking” and perhaps even a minority? Boy, does Craigslist have an opportunity for you!

Kim Jong-il sticks his nose in North Korean literary theory. Now if he could only feed them.

The art of survival in Zimbabwean literature.

On the heels of two lifetime achievement awards, Cynthia Ozick sits down for a “mid-career” interview… at the age of 80.

Toronto author narcs out the traffic police.