Neil Gaiman reads his short story “Babycakes”:

This week’s Poet’s Choice recounts the unifying power of a Keats fragment.

Barbara Walters’ audio book version of her memoir Audition leaves out her sexy escapades.

Times Online serves up an exclusive interview with The Return author Victoria Hislop and a side of excerpt.

Dylan Thomas: “Reluctant propagandist“.

Jennifer Cuddy at LitKicks explores the nuances of John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939

“Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not.”

- George Bernard Shaw

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Larry M. Bartels makes the case for the the fluctuations in the gap between the haves and the have nots in, UNEQUAL DEMOCRACY.

A crime novelist goes real-life monster hunting in Italy.

The last days of Robert Kennedy’s campaign moved Thurston Clarke to keep it forever in THE LAST CAMPAIGN: ROBERT F. KENNEDY AND 82 DAYS THAT INSPIRED AMERICA.

And picture books, from The Christian Science Monitor.

A 10 minute film on the life and works of author and poet Raymond Carver:

AuthorScoop is pleased to announce the arrival of a new contributor (and old friend), Rob McCreery. Rob is a gifted poet and essayist and has served the online writing community as a labor of love for some time now as Poetry Moderator and Supermod over at the Absolute Write Water Cooler.

As you can see from his initial offering (below), his keen insights make for wonderful reading.

It’s great to have you here, Rob.

Years ago, when I lived in Boston, I twice bought my father old books as gifts. I’m sure I paid at least market price for them, but I was astounded to be able to get them at all. They were magnificent: beyond their beauty, beyond the marvel of the words printed in them - beyond the depth and dignity of their very age - they were Significant, and they deserved to be hallowed. Each purchase was around one or two days’ pay; my days were a poor standard by which to judge these marvelous works.

One purchase was a five-volume set of the complete works of Byron - published in 1817, bound in leather. They were - are - magnificent, and they are Byron. God, Byron was alive when they were published, so they weren’t even complete yet.

The other purchase was a two-volume set of the poetical works of Longfellow - signed by the poet himself. The ink, once black, had started to turn sepia, as it does.

(The autographed biography of George Washington was beyond my means.)

I was amazed not just that I was able to afford these works, but that they were for sale. For sale, among the leaning, overladen shelves of a small bookshop, in among mere mortal texts. Who, I wondered, if they had these books, would part with them?

I never knew, but it’s this awe for the old and original, the pages touched by the creator, that came to mind this evening.

I read, you see, that Charles Dickens’ writing desk was recently sold at auction, for £433,250, to an Irish entrepreneur. According to the article, the winning bid was several times the estimated selling price. The buyer, on the other hand, thought it was a great bargain at that price; after all, Great Expectations was brought into the world upon this noble furniture.

The order of magnitude is quite different, but I understood immediately how this man felt. I’m at a loss as to how one could part with such a piece, but it sounds to me as though it’s fallen into very good hands.

Lovejoy, the antiques dealer and general low-rent rogue of Jonathan Gash’s splendid series of crime novels, is a divvy. He can feel a bonging in the chest when in the presence of true antiques: they are, he says, imbued with a near life-force of their own, one that cannot be faked (Lovejoy sometimes produces fake reproductions, but much to his personal anguish, and only, er, in emergencies). Lovejoy would’ve understood too.

Oh, yes, at the end of the article on the Dickens sale, we learn of two other sales: the typescript of Churchill’s 1940 speech to Parliament on the Battle of Britain, and (ho hum) a first folio of Shakespeare’s plays.

It’s dumbfounding to realise that everything - regardless of stature or provenance - really does have its price. But it’s also heartening to know that these things exist.

Caleb Crain over at Steamboats are Ruining Everything has posted the transcript of his riveting talk at a recent n+1 panel debate “The Internet: We All Live There Now”, addressing the impact of writing for the Internet on literary style. A taste:

This willingness in readers to overlook form raises a question as to whether online writing entertains, in the traditional sense of the word. I am not sure that it does. Reading online does not seem to me to be a pleasure in itself but a response to irritation. That is, it is not like eating an ice cream cone; it is like scratching an itch. I am only reporting on my own feelings here, of course, but while I am doing so, let me report a further kink in them. Between us, my boyfriend and I subscribe to more than a dozen magazines, and if I pick one up, I know instantly that I am goofing off. Online reading, however, fails to set off my leisure detection system. Part of the failure may be perceptual—online reading takes place while I’m sitting in front of my laptop, immobilized, as I am when working. But I think, too, that online writing may, even in its supposedly silly moments, be covertly work-like: there is a fair amount of tedium in its unedited prose. Many of the jokes and references are only comprehensible to regular visitors. No one, my hit counter tells me, reads blogs on the weekend. And reading online prose is not refreshing. An action movie leaves the viewer juiced; a novel may leave the reader wistful. But reading blogs, in my experience, leaves me more addled and nervous than when I began. This work-like character makes the internet particularly corrosive , by the way, to the productivity of those who work at home, such as writers. Through web browsing, the freelancer communes with the procrastinating office drone—at his peril, because the freelancer receives no weekly paycheck.

Check out the entire transcript here.

Actor Sidney Poitier turns the pangs of mortality into a Life Beyond Measure, Letters to My Great-Granddaughter.

The New York Times presents an illustrated retrospective of Thomas Fuller at 400.

The Harry Potter series has now topped sales of 400 million copies.

The BBC looks back at the life of playwright Joe Orton.

R.I.P. Tasha Tudor

“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.”

- E. E. Cummings

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After mentioning to a friend and co-worker that I’ve been working on a political novel for more than a year now, he asked about my own tastes in the genre, resulting in an extended conversation/argument. And given the prevalence of Top 10 lists on the Internet, I figured one more wouldn’t hurt, so I’ll recount them here.

From Big Brother to Willie Stark, here are my picks for the Top 10 Political Novels of the Past 100 years:

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1. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

One wonders how Orwell’s classic will age, as it’s become a subject of passionate debate between those who find it dated, melodramatic and politically flawed, and those—including me—who think those people have simply been fortunate enough to put a comfortable distance between themselves and the very real horrors of Stalinism.

2. The Plague by Albert Camus

More aptly termed a philosophical work, perhaps, Camus’ existential novel explores the human condition stressed to its limits by the horrors of a plague. Stark and unflinching, it masterfully blends cold reality with an almost Kafka-esque sense of detachment.

3. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Huxley’s dystopian vision differs greatly from Orwell’s in many ways, not the least of which is its satirical tone. Nevertheless, it packs a punch of near-equal force in its warning against the effects of totalitarianism on free thought and expression.

4. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Ellison’s exploration of Black identity and its extension into the political landscape of the 20th century resonates not only in what it says, but how it says it. Its experimental style resulted in one of the true triumphs of modern symbolism.

5. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Accessible, often funny and politically poignant, Harper Lee’s Southern Gothic masterpiece on racial injustice is, thankfully, still a mainstay on school reading lists, despite censorship attempts by PC do-gooders.

6. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

Another dystopian classic, but one that presents a chilling vision of a future in which women are brutally subjugated. And, sadly, another novel that enriches and provokes young minds, yet is constantly under threat of censorship for its sexual content and anti-religious sentiment.

7. Animal Farm by George Orwell

Regardless of how Nineteen Eighty-Four might fare in the decades and centuries to come, there can be little doubt that Orwell’s wonderfully constructed allegory (though also a protest against Stalinism) will almost certainly continue to be read and studied. Satirical and frightening at once, Animal Farm’s success lies in its penetration of human nature and the baseness from which oppression flows.

8. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Taking place in a single day in a Soviet labor camp, this disturbing work is a severe example of “writing what you know”. Having been imprisoned in one of Stalin’s camps for eight years, Solzhenitsyn knew firsthand the cruelty of the powerful imposed on the powerless, and it ranks among the top works of sheer courage in literary history.

9. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Another great work of satire and perhaps the most pointed anti-war novel in 20th century American literature, Catch-22 is sometimes frustrating in its multiple points of view, its delayed interconnections and its jumbled sequence. Nevertheless, the reader bold enough to see it through is more than rewarded for the effort.

10. All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren

A sentimental choice, of sorts. Growing up in Louisiana, it was all but impossible to escape the considerable shadow of Huey P. Long, a man who damn near singlehandedly dragged the state into the 20th century. While Warren’s Willie Stark is only loosely based on the famous governor, his portrayal as a walking contradiction, part megalomaniac and part populist, rings true for anyone who paid attention to politics in Deep South.

Metro Santa Cruz writes up an urban fantasy novel and a book about the culture, down to the dirt its grown in, of food.

The New Statesmen reviews The Harvard Law Review from Barack Obama’s reign as editor.

THE DRAGONFLY DOOR, a children’s book, wins a Benjamin Franklin Award and gets a good review too.

Mt. St. Helens’ recovery is brought up to date in a collection called, IN THE BLAST ZONE: CATASTROPHE AND RECOVERY ON MT. ST. HELENS.

From the NobelPrize.org YouTube description:

Interview excerpts with the 2006 Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature Orhan Pamuk describes his idea of a writer and the solitude and soul searching required to write.

An Orwell flashback in the New Statesman on pamphlet literature.

Owen Wilson is a big poetry fan.

Anatoly Liberman explores the thorny issue of spelling reform at the Oxford University Press Blog.

With spelling well in hand, let’s look at punctuation, shall we?

PopMatters goes explorin’ in the world of used books.

“What is needed is, in the end, simply this: solitude, great inner solitude. Going into yourself and meeting no one for hours on end–that is what you must be able to attain.”

- Rainer Maria Rilke

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Library Journal does up a rash of new books, nice and efficient. Good work.

Arguing against God: John Allen Paulo makes his mathmetician’s case for atheism.  (Although if you don’t like math, rest easy.  They say he uses mostly just logic anyway.)

Summer soul-searching and world-sleuthing for youngsters in THE CALDER GAME. Sounds very cool.

A list of what’s new in paperback from The New York Times via The News & Observer.

DEER HUNTING WITH JESUS: WHY THE LEFT DOESN’T GET IT is reviewed by a leftie.

The Diamond Dogs author talks writing, painting, philosophy and more:

The notion of a British Poet Laureate quickly becoming obsolete.

Copernicus’ masterwork fetches 2.2 million at auction.

Tom Wolfe stands up for newspapers on Charlie Rose.

Can reading galleys in public get you laid?

Galleycat asks, “Will video kill the book review stars?”

“An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.”

- Oscar Wilde

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Huh. Audio book reviews. Of course there’s such a thing. And here’s a pair of them just now.

A protagonist dog can be a very good thing. Who knew?

Kerry Cohen’s, LOOSE GIRL: A MEMOIR OF PROMISCUITY is called a must-read for adolescent girls.

Monsters & Critics seems like the place to go for in-depth reviews of horror, sci-fi, and fantasy.

Wait, they also do other kinds of books, too. This one - THE CAVEMAN’S PREGNANCY COMPANION, by David Port sounds pretty funny.