The New York Times wades into the debate of whether online reading is really reading.

Simon & Schuster goes after rappers Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown, in separate lawsuits, to recoup advance royalties, with interest, for manuscripts that were never delivered.

Gawker reports on screenwriter Zak Penn’s outrage at Ed Norton’s claim that he wrote the script for The Incredible Hulk. (as always, the comments are as amusing as the story).

The Guardian’s Peter Conrad and Naomi Alderman duel it out in a point/counterpoint on e-books.

Timesonline presents “Ten things you need to know about Haruki Murakami”.

“When one burns one’s bridges, what a very nice fire it makes.”

- Dylan Thomas

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Here’s a book on kayaking and we haven’t done that before! I think.

American Chronicle calls David Flynn’s TEMPLE AT THE CENTER OF TIME a must read.

Chicago Tribune readers weigh in on why book reviews are important to them.

And the Telegraph makes a morsel of Ophelia Fields, THE KIT-CAT CLUB: FRIENDS WHO IMAGINED A NATION.

MacAllister Stone, owner and operator of Absolute Write, has created a sister site for avid readers called Written in Stone.

A link to the site has been added to our Friends category on the right, and we wish MacAllister the best of luck with her new project.

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In the lean and mean years of the Great Depression, the New Deal still found a way to support writers and artists through Federal Project Number One. One of the programs under its umbrella was the Federal Writers’ Project, which—among other endeavors—paid writers (including some big names like Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston and Eudora Welty) as little as $20 a week to write a series of travel guides about America. Now coming online, these guides are revealing a great deal about the frontier spirit that still prevailed in those days.

An interesting example of the series was covered by the New York Times earlier this week under the headline A State That Never Was in Wyoming. The piece explores the strange, if short-lived, saga of Absaroka:

In early 1939, as talk of war in Europe clouded the horizon and hard economic times gripped the nation, a group of business and political leaders in this northern Wyoming city hatched an audacious, if not quite ridiculous, plan to break off huge chunks of Wyoming, South Dakota and Montana and form a new state.

Editors at the Depression-era Federal Writers’ Project, which happened at the time to be combing the country for local color (and for writers as well, for a series of travel guides about the United States that are now coming online and enjoying a public revival of sorts), included the story in the Wyoming guide, published in 1941, as an example of ten-gallon cowboy eccentricity.

The tale of the would-be rebels, who called their new state Absaroka (pronounced ab-SOR-ka), from the Crow word meaning “children of the large-beaked bird,” then faded into the mist. Details were forgotten — how a baseball-player-turned-street-commissioner in Sheridan named A. R. Swickard appointed himself governor and began hearing writs of grievance, and how license plates were distributed along with pictures of Miss Absaroka 1939, the first and apparently last of her breed. There was even an Absarokan state visit, when the king of Norway made a swing through Montana.

This is the second story in a series that the Times will run on the little known works created under the Federal Writers’ Project. You can find the first here.

An interview with the author on Sky Arts’ The Book Show:

The New York Times gets its turn for a Q&A with the delightfully crusty Doris Lessing.

A previously unpublished Stephen King short story to be released as “a series of 25 original comic-style video episodes”.

Guardian Book Blog’s Shirley Dent revisits the “ethereal world of radio poetry”.

National Poetry Slam 2008 announces matchups and schedule.

R.I.P. Charles Guenther

“There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.”

- Ralph Ellison

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Mmmmm. Indian food.

January magazine reviews DERVISHES by Beth Helms. I imagine Ms. Helms probably needed an icepack afterwards.

But they had a page of crime fiction that they mostly actually liked.

Journalist Julia Reed tells of her formative years in New Orleans with THE HOUSE OF FIRST STREET.

Horn Book Magazine offers up a page of reviews from its July/August issue.

An interesting 10 minute piece on the influential “Generation of ‘27″ poet:

Award-winning Canadian author Lawrence Hill gets audience with the Queen.

First and only Chinese winner of Nobel Prize for Literature collects black market copies of his banned work.

Boom times for Canada’s public libraries.

Atlantic Free Press’ Eric Larson bonds with Vincent Bugliosi as they howl in the wilderness.

TIME profiles newly announced poet laureate Kay Ryan.

“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