Absolute Writer childeroland sniffed out an excellent story from the Guardian Book Blog, revealing that Dmitri Nabokov, son of Lolita author Vladimir Nabokov, has decided against carrying out his late father’s command that his last novel be destroyed and will, instead, publish the book:

Vladimir Nabokov’s The Original of Laura will now not be thrown onto the flames, the 73-year-old has told Der Spiegel magazine, arguing that his father, the creator of Lolita and Pale Fire who died in 1977, would not want his son to suffer any more over his most tortuous dilemma.

If he fails to carry out his father’s last will, Dmitri is effectively betraying him, but carry it out and the world loses forever what is potentially a precious gift from the grave from one of the greatest 20th-century novelists.

An intriguing and sobering predicament for a son, to be sure, but the thought of losing such a work is depressing as hell.

Basic Instinct director Paul Verhoeven has written a book that hypothesizes that Jesus Christ was the offspring of a Roman soldier who raped his mother Mary. Not only that, he hopes (surprise, surprise) to make it into a movie someday:

Marianna Sterk of the publishing house J.M. Meulenhoff said the book includes several ideas that run contrary to Christian faith, including the suggestion that Jesus could be the son of a Roman soldier who raped Mary during a Jewish uprising against Roman rule in 4 B.C.

While Hollywood has produced more than its fair share of derivative claptrap, Monty Python fans will certainly recognize that this plot twist was depicted (albeit in the parallel life of Brian of Nazareth) some 30 years ago in the hilarious satire Life of Brian.

The money shot (as it were):

Mandy: Your father was a Roman.
Brian: You mean… you were RAPED?!
Mandy: Well… at first, yes.

Still, for a director whose legacy is forever intertwined with Sharon Stone’s crotch, even a blasphemous foray into Christianity might provide some measure of atonement…

Who knew bananas deserved their own book?

Heavyweight journalist, Anthony Lewis, condenses two centuries of First Amendment issues in, FREEDOM FOR THE THOUGHT THAT WE HATE: A BIOGRAPHY OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT

NOT QUITE WHAT I WAS PLANNING: SIX-WORD MEMOIRS BY WRITERS FAMOUS AND OBSCURE - Just go look. It’s cool. I’m buying it.

And a page full of children’s books to round out the day.

With this summer’s Olympic Games looming, all eyes are on politics. We can only hope the controversy will at least hold its breath for a short while so the athletes can fight for Gold and win or lose as reward for all they’ve sacrificed in training. We will cheer for them and cry with them as we do every four years.

Then Beijing will dismantle the works and it’ll likely be back to cold-war-and-uneasy-peace as usual.

And the athletes will resume their training. A few will retire and a handful of fledglings will make the cut and take up a life that’s difficult for most of us to comprehend. I’ve often wondered about the champions - and they’re all champions to reach Olympic standards - and what is the cost of their talent. Some of them are really only children.

They leave homes for dormitories and workdays of double-digit hours. They live and breathe their sport. The bleed and break and struggle against their bodies and the laws of nature to show us what human beings are capable of. And who can argue that this isn’t what it takes to achieve Olympian excellence?

Salon Magazine spoke to ’80s US Olympic darling, Jennifer Sey, about her revealing memoir, CHALKED UP, and whether the ends justify the means.

The book, in advance copies, has already rattled some of gymnastic’s heavy hitters and promises to function as an exposé, although Sey claims her intent was only to relate her personal experience and to remind all enthusiasts of the sport that these are children, not machines, that are being groomed.

…coaches have an obligation to realize that they’re not just raising champions, they’re raising young women. Hopefully they’ll maybe think twice about some of the practices they might employ. I love the sport — I don’t want the sport to go down. I just want people to think differently.

The timing for the book, of course, is advantageous and it looks like an important read if we’re to make sense of the fallout that could result from allegations of mental, physical, and sexual abuse that our athletes trade for their childhoods.

Uploaded to YouTube by the mind behind Subterranean Cinema, this video of Norman Mailer and acclaimed actor Rip Torn brawling on a grassy hillside is both tragically comic and comically tragic.

From subcin’s introduction:

In the summer of 1968, the elegant resort town of East Hampton, NY witnessed a bizarre invasion of the celebrities and unknowns, professional actors and amateurs, assembled by Norman Mailer to make a movie in which he would be both director and star.

Mailer, who had already made two unconventional experimental films, was determined to give his revolutionary philosophy of cinema its first full-scale test. His object was to rescue the screen from conformist make-believe, to dissolve the line between fiction and actuality, to set the stage for an explosion of human passions. What resulted was MAIDSTONE.

Mailer played a character named Norman T. Kingsley, a filmmaker who is contemplating a run for president. His half brother in the film is played by Rip Torn. Allegedly, Torn took his part too seriously and attacked Mailer with a small hammer, and Mailer retaliated by nearly biting off Torn’s ear. This clip shows the actual fight.

Roll it!

The strange, sad tale of poet Catherine Breese Davis gets a little happier with some posthumous respect.

ABC News commissions a documentary of J.K. Rowling.

Irony alert: ‘Financial freedom’ may well lead to the clink for self-help author.

R.I.P. Le Dat

The high-class, prestigious world of memoirs gets another star in its crown.

Sometimes even a cold-hearted bastard like me finds beauty in the world.

I love Gawker. There. I said it.

It’s always fast-moving (you can actually see new stories being written if you hit ‘refresh’ fast enough), and it’s laced with a sense of humor that’s equal parts smile and sneer. I like that.

Today’s Internet column, In Praise of Anonymity, was no exception, gently (and yet brutally) skewering the self-righteousness of Anne Rice (and others) in defense of the great democratization of the Web.

Here’s a taste:

We can expect this from Rice: the 66-year old author was born without the all-consuming need for the web. After a life as an atheist, Rice devoted herself to writing “only for the Lord” in 2004. (As we know, the Lord hates the Internet.) But it’s not just her. Smarter people than Rice are attacking what they believe to be the vicious tone and persistent anonymity of the Internet. The internet’s harshest critic of late has been former Gawker editor Emily Gould, who seriously hurt the Internet’s feelings in an Observer article on Jonathan Zittrain’s anti-Internet tract, The Future of the Internet And How To Stop It.

Read the entire column here. Really, go do it.

Scandal within, scandal without - Isabel Fonseca’s new novel, ATTACHMENT, reignites British tabloid speculation of her, but that’s well easier than getting reviewed by her famous novelist husband…

Bruce Benderson waxes nostalgic and provocative in his retrospective essay collection, SEX & ISOLATION.

THE TEN YEAR NAP makes a novel of career-women-turned-stay-at-home-moms finding themselves not as needed at home and a decade out of their ambitions.

Name-dropping looks better than usual when Julie Andrews does it memoir-style in HOME: A MEMOIR OF MY EARLY YEARS.

The Spaghetti Book Club is too much fun - kids reviewing kids’ books in a terrific literacy campaign.

Rare clips of the poet with snippets of her work and home movies:

I was poking around in the news of writing this morning and ran across another article comparing and contrasting the printed word versus digital ones. The fear-spiked curiosity of what will happen to bound paper books in the Internet Age may be even more sharply felt in places where Freedom of Speech is more of a concept than an imperative. The article, out of Viet Nam, explores the pros and cons to the press-enter-and-go brand of literature.

Overall though, writers everywhere wonder about the same things.

But on the downside, author’s freedom could come at the expense of quality, and with all the junk in the virtual world, it’s sometimes difficult to find a good read on the Internet, writer Vo Thi Xuan Ha says.

How to become the most published author in history in less than a decade.

Musings from Raymond Souster’s kitchen.

The Wall Street Journal rediscovers Capote’s “small, exquisite gem”.

A moving glimpse into the life of James Agee, as seen through the prism of Brooklyn.

Martin Waddell: Football’s loss is literature’s gain.

Writers and academics bitch about the undergraduate riff-raff invading the British Library.

Last Lecture living on.

Former supermodels rarely segue into successful careers as novelists (go on… name one). But when you’re the granddaughter of one of the world’s best-selling authors and daughter of an accomplished writer of children’s books, your pedigree alone can open doors that might otherwise remained closed. After that, it’s up to you.

Sophie Dahl, granddaughter of Roald Dahl, masterful author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach and dozens of other tales for all ages, appears to be up to the challenge.

After a successful and glamorous run in the fashion world, Sophie turned her attention to the family business and tried her hand at storytelling. Following an almost slapstick first attempt (a dog ate her manuscript, I shit you not), Sophie started over, ultimately producing the semi-autobiographical debut novel Playing With the Grown-ups.

The San Francisco Chronicle explores Dahl’s transformation from model to novelist:

The story line has piqued the interest of the British, who see parallels with the author’s life. A beautiful mother who suffers from depression? Check: Dahl’s mother is Tessa Dahl, a former actress-turned writer who had Sophie when she was 19 and has chronicled her own personal struggles.

What about the precocious daughter? Check: Sophie had a nomadic childhood that included 10 schools and 17 homes in New York, London and even an ashram. She also matured into a head-turner and a bit of a hellcat, one who reportedly dated Mick Jagger.

Check out the entire article here.

Apparently, it doesn’t take one to know one. Jonathan Yardley reviews Keith Gessen’s slacker novel, ALL THE SAD YOUNG LITERARY MEN.

90+ years and FDR’s extramarital affair is, according to the NYT, still worth reading about.

If Jean Feraca’s memoir, I HEAR VOICES, is as interesting as its write-up at Bookreview.com, well then…

Somewhere, someone noticed a lack of books about the perfume industry. It’s been remedied and gets three and a half stars to boot!

CHOCOLAT gets a sequel of slightly darker confection in Joanne Harris’, THE GIRL WITH NO SHADOW.

POISON ARROWS: THE AMAZING STORY OF HOW PROZAC AND ANAESTHETICS WERE DEVELOPED FROM DEADLY JUNGLE POISON DARTS

I’d say something clever but the cool title took up all my space.

Despite a recent change in Turkey’s draconian speech laws, writers and publishers continue to worry that they may end up in jail for “insulting Turkishness”.

Reuters reports that, under recent draft changes to Turkey’s notorious Article 301, it “will be a crime to insult the Turkish nation, rather than Turkishness” and the maximum sentence will be reduced from five years to three. Not exactly a sea-change for free expression.

Article 301 indeed has a dark history, even in recent times:

After years of European Union criticism, Turkey is amending article 301 under which Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk and Armenian- Turkish editor Hrant Dink were tried for insulting Turkish identity. Dink was later shot dead by a militant nationalist.

The proposed changes, however, are so minor that writers and publishers in Turkey fear they will continue to face frequent trials. Meanwhile, other laws which put just as much pressure on freedom of expression remain untouched.

Check out the entire article here.

TimesOnline shares their list of the 50 Greatest Crime Writers of all time with pithy justifications for each selection.

Blacklist: The WGA denounces strikebreakers from their recent work stoppage.

Good stuff. Mentor program pairs aspiring writers with published authors.

Spoken word poetry and the Youtube generation: a marriage made in Heaven? (or is it Hell?)

Seattlepi.com spends a moment with young-adult novelist Justina Chen Headley.

A lament for the lost art of writing about art.

The CBC is reporting that romance writer Cassie Edwards and Signet Books have “mutually agreed to part ways” after the publisher “conducted an extensive review” of Edwards’ novels in the wake of allegations of plagiarism.

Romance novel website smartbitchestrashybooks.com set off the firestorm in January by posting excerpts of the writer’s works next to similar passages drawn from reference books and magazines.

Penguin Group initially defended Edwards, who sloppily pled ignorance in a January interview, in which she admitted that she “takes” material from other sources and didn’t know she was supposed to credit them.

Romance icon Nora Roberts, however, saw it another way: “By my definition,” she said, “copying another’s work and passing it as your own equals plagiarism.”

Westerner, Martha Sherrill, gets Japan right in DOG MAN, AN UNCOMMON LIFE ON A FARAWAY MOUNTAIN.

Ever heard an economics book hailed as literature? Me neither. Here, see for yourself.

Acclaimed French novel finds new accolades in English - MEMORY by Philippe Grimbert

Nicholson Baker’s HUMAN SMOKE: THE BEGINNINGS OF WWII, THE END OF CIVILIZATION gets slammed by Bloomberg.

A review of book reviewers? Cats chase their tails (tales?) in this article on in-fighting among female book reviewers. Hey, they said catfighting first.

A Who’s Who of SciFi and Fantasy authors will descend on Austin later this week for the 2008 Nebula Awards Weekend by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, Inc.

From the SFWA website:

The event will take place at the Omni Austin Hotel Downtown at San Jacinto and 8th Street. The event will be hosted by the Austin Literary Arts Maintenance Organization (ALAMO). Famed British author and Austin-area resident Michael Moorcock will be honored as the next Damon Knight Grand Master during the ceremonies, with long-time fantasy and science fiction writer Ardath Mayhar being honored as Author Emeritus. East Texas literary icon Joe R. Lansdale will serve as toastmaster during the awards.

A complete list of works on the final Nebula Award ballot can be found here.

Part of the seductive power of the Internet is the ability to journey from one related link to another until you’ve dug yourself in so deep, a good chunk of your day has mysteriously melted away.

After posting about Evelyn Waugh’s house being up for sale in this morning’s LitLinks, i embarked on just such an adventure and ended up listening to a compellingly hostile half-century old radio interview.

In 1953, the literary giant showed up for an interview with BBC’s Home Service, no doubt expecting a fairly routine and civil discussion. What he found, instead, was something of a literary lynch mob:

(H)is trio of inquisitors, Charles Wilmot, Jack Davies and Stephen Black, were out for blood, determined to lead the increasingly cantankerous middle-aged writer into unleashing some of his more illiberal opinions over the airwaves.

Writing in The Spectator some days after the broadcast, Peter Fleming declared that he had “never heard an interview conducted in public on such ill-natured terms”, likening it to a bullfight.

Waugh later fictionalised the jousting in his final novel, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, allowing his hero to sum up: “They tried to make an ass of me. I don’t believe they succeeded.”

Check out the audio here. Trust me, it’s worth it.

The science behind it makes my brain hurt, but there’s no denying it’s a fascinating experiment.

The Sunbeam Poem Projector is a Master’s Thesis project at the Art Center College of Design and brainchild of Jiyeon Song. “Using a complex array of perforations,” Song writes, “light passing through the pavilion’s surface produces shifting patterns, which transform into the legible text of a poem.”

Incredible time-lapse video here.