Alexandra Alter chats it up with Elif Batuman about her interesting debut novel, The Possessed—a “tongue-in-cheek account of her study of Russian literature.” (Wall Street Journal)

Kudos on 50 years to Phoenix Literary Magazine. (TNJN)

Canadian novelist and essayist Ralston Saul takes South Korea’s prestigious Manhae Grand Prize for Literature. (The Globe and Mail)

Better late than never: Mark Sanderson’s weekly roundup of tidbits in “Literary Life”. (Telegraph)

M.A. Orthofer posts the shortlist for the Best Translated Book Award, the winner of which will be announced tonight. (The Literary Saloon)

Actress and musician Hilary Duff to pen a YA series for Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers. (GalleyCat)

New York Times Book Review to be made available for eReaders. (Poynter Online)

Sam Jordison makes “the ecological case for ebooks.” (Guardian Books Blog)

Tom Roberge looks back at how Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke met and made history. (The Rumpus)

“On this day in 1948, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda, and eight other patients were killed in a fire at the Highland Mental Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. This was eighteen years after Zelda’s first mental breakdown and eight years after Scott’s fatal heart attack — a world away from the Jazz Age they helped to define, and which helped to defeat them.” (Today in Literature)

Iran’s big bad mullahs afraid to let 82 year-old poet Simin Behbahani travel to France. (BBC)

McCrum reminds us that crap is the grease that keeps the gears of the publishing industry turning. (The Guardian)

Seth Grahame-Smith talks about the literary mashup trend he helped foist on us. (GalleyCat)

UT’s Harry Ransom Center scores again—this time with the David Foster Wallace archive. (HRC)

Garrett Kenyon looks back at the top ten crime and mystery novels of last year. (LitKicks)

Jesse Chambers chats it up with poet Billy Collins. (Birmingham Weekly)

JK Evanczuk weighs the relative pros and cons of creation by committee. (Lit Drift)

The Daily Beast editors round up the 10 best revelations in Karl Rove’s new memoir. (The Daily Beast)

Neil Gaiman talks about creepy things. (CBS News)

Molly Flatt frets over the endless distractions that a reader endures in our high-tech world. (Guardian Books Blog)

“On this day in 1994 Charles Bukowski died. Though dismissed by most critics, he was the Grand Old Man of the fringe presses, publishing over fifty books in a career which spanned a half-century and brought near-celebrity status — appearances with Allen Ginsberg, interviews in Rolling Stone, sold-out readings in Europe (to which he would be able to take not the two six-packs but four bottles of good French wine), and a movie of his earlier, Barfly life.” (Today in Literature)

Acclaimed author John Edgar Wideman opts for self-publishing through Lulu for his new collection of stories. (Publishers Weekly)

Carol Rumens steps into a poetic minefield as she takes on the always hotly-debated William Carlos Williams poem, “The Red Wheelbarrow.” (Guardian Books Blog)

M.A. Orthofer explains why reports of the Man ‘Asian’ Literary Prize’s death were greatly exaggerated. (The Literary Saloon)

Mystery writer Elizabeth Spann Craig rounds up a treasure trove of links to various and sundry writing tips (thanks, Aleta). (Mystery Writing is Murder)

Lincoln Michel meets David Shields on his own terms as he dissects Reality Hunger. (The Rumpus)

Former book designer Craig Mod says good riddance to print. (NYT)

Poet Gary Snyder to receive the 10th annual Robert Creeley Award. (The Milford Daily News)

Sherlock Holmes fans rally to save the Surrey home of Arthur Conan Doyle. (BBC)

Stuart Evers explains the rare and unexpected trick of “pulling a Roth.” (Guardian Books Blog)

Farrar, Straus & Giroux editor Lorin Stein to take the helm at The Paris Review. (NYT)

Iris Murdoch’s relationship with a former student revealed in letters from the author. (Telegraph)

Susan Salter Reynolds profiles prolific author and essayist John McPhee. (Times Argus Online)

Are Harlequin romances’ cowboys and doctors a sign of evolutionary instincts? (The Guardian)

Katy Guest finds a hopeful future for poetry in the number of poetry competition entries by young people. (The Independent)

M.A. Othofer weighs on on the calls for translators to get their due as artists in their own right. (The Literary Saloon)

Jason Boog tracks down the best book editors on Twitter. (GalleyCat)

Mark Sanderson returns with more odds and ends from the literary world. (Telegraph)

Alexander McCall looks back at his time in Belfast during the Troubles. (The Guardian)

“On this day in 1967 Alice B. Toklas died, at the age of eighty-nine. Toklas spent her last twenty-one years without Gertrude Stein, but with the same idiosyncratic devotion to Stein’s genius as she had throughout their thirty-three years together. This did not protect her from those managing Stein’s estate, and at eighty-seven she was evicted from the flat which the two had shared for decades.” (Today in Literature)

Maria Bustillos looks back at the envy and hate leveled at Wyndham Lewis to make sense of the envy and hate leveled at Dave Eggers. (The Awl)

Make it stop… Quirk Books announces yet another mash-up. (The Independent)

Edith Grossman makes the case for counting translation as an art form all its own. (The Boston Globe)

The Rochester and Chatham Dickens Fellowship raising money to save the chalet where Dickens wrote Great Expectations. (Telegraph)

Penguin explores the brave new world of iPad content. (CNET)

Harper Teen shells out seven figures for a debut Young Adult trilogy. (Publishers Weekly)

Michael Cieply looks at the next steps in the Cussler case. (NYT)

Toby Lichtig explores whether the Holocaust’s place in Jewish literature should change. (Guardian Books Blog)

“On this day in 1928 Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born. Living to Tell the Tale, his first volume of memoirs, is prefaced by Marquez’s belief that “Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.” What follows is recounted in such a colorful, captivating way that we can only hope, given his lymphatic cancer, Marquez remains well enough to tell the whole tale.” (Today in Literature)

$5 million judgment against Clive Cussler overturned by a California appeals court. (Denver Business Journal)

Sam Jordison looks back (on balance, rather fondly) at Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated. (Guardian Books Blog)

IndyBest rolls out a slide show of their choices for the best new books. (The Independent)

DreamWorks acquires the film rights to Kathryn Stockett’s bestseller The Help. (Reuters)

Michael O’Sullivan recaps last month’s Sulu DC, which showcased Asian American poets. (Washington Post)

James Cameron does some damage control to save his Hiroshima film plans. (NYT)

Meanwhile, Chinese sci-fi writer Zhou Shaomou sues Cameron for ripping off one of his novels.  (People’s Daily Online)

Jason Boog rounds up the honors from last night’s Shorty Awards in NYC. (GalleyCat)

“On this day in 1954, Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood was published in England; coming out just four months after his death in New York, it was an immediate best seller. Thomas’s lifelong ambivalence towards Wales — “Land of my fathers. My fathers can keep it”– is maintained in the play, his Laugharne becoming the imaginary village of Llareggub, or “bugger-all” backwards.” (Today in Literature)

Pakistani-American author Daniyal Mueenuddin takes the $20,000 Story Prize for his collection, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders. (GalleyCat)

The judges have been announced for The Man Book International Prize 2011. (The Man Booker Prizes)

JK Evanczuk rounds up some amusing parodies of The Guardian’s recent writing tips article. (Lit Drift)

The Paris Review presents a wonderful composite interview of Kurt Vonnegut by David Hayman, David Michaelis, George Plimpton and Richard Rhodes. (The Paris Review)

Evan Maloney examines the importance of reading for writers. (Guardian Books Blog)

The American Society of Magazine Editors announces the categories and finalists for the National Magazine Awards for Digital Media 2010. (ASME)

HarperCollins/Harper Perennial snags the exclusive rights to Zora Neale Hurston’s adult backlist for the next decade. (Publishers Weekly)

M.A. Orthofer comments on yet another ‘best books of the decade’ list. (The Literary Saloon)

“On this day in 1675 John Bunyan went to prison for the third time, convicted of preaching his Baptist faith without a license. In over twelve years of confinement Bunyan wrote numerous books and pamphlets, including Part I of A Pilgrim’s Progress. It sold 100,000 copies in his lifetime, and is still reported to be the most sold book in the world, next to the Bible.” (Today in Literature)

Friends and colleagues remember Barry Hannah. (The Clarion-Ledger)

Chinese poet Liao Yiwu, who spent four years in jail for writing a poem about the 1989 massacre at Tian’anmen Square, pulled off a plane headed for German literature festival. (Deutsche Welle)

Apparently having your book debunked can make it more popular… (The Boston Globe)

Del Rey acquires Terry Brooks’ three new ‘Shannara’ novels. (GalleyCat)

Australian playwright Louis Nowra goes after Germaine Greer and her “hippie ideology.” (Telegraph)

Saudi Arabia’s Al-Jouf Literary Club struck by arsonist; radical conservatives suspected. (Arab News)

Neal Ascherson seeks to reconcile the seemingly divergent paths in the works of Ryszard Kapuściński. (Guardian Books Blog)

It’s on: Queens kicks off search for its new poet laureate. (New York Daily News)

“On this day in 1982, the experimental French writer Georges Perec died, at the age of forty-five. Like Italo Calvino, Perec belonged to the “Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle” group, founded in 1960; translated, this would be “Workshop of Potential Literature,” but the group is known internationally as OuLiPo, if only because of their enthusiasm for the lipogram.” (Today in Literature)

David Goodwillie chats it up with (the incredibly funny) Sam Lipsyte. (The Rumpus)

Holt will not, after all, attempt revisions of Charles Pellegrino’s The Last Train from Hiroshima. (MOBYLIVES)

The Spring 2010 issue of The Quarterly Conversation is now online, with with essays on Nobel laureate Herta Mueller, Jonathan Swift, Per Petterson and much more. (The Quarterly Conversation)

They’ve also announced the launch of their new blog. (The Constant Conversation)

Is Australia the last great hope for poetry? (Publishing Perspectives)

Jason Boog chronicles the fallout from Motoko Rich’s NYT weekend story on the math of the eBook. (GalleyCat)

The LGBTQ literary community gets a new online webzine and blog community with the launch of Lambda Literary. (Publishers Weekly)

Darragh McManus recounts his unlikely correspondence with Don Delillo. (Guardian Books Blog)

R.I.P. Barry Hannah, novelist, short story author and director of the University of Mississippi MFA program in creative writing. (The Oxford Eagle)

“On this day in 1930 forty-five-year-old D. H. Lawrence died in Vence, France. The medical cause was tuberculosis, but Lawrence at least partially believed that a lifetime of vilification was to blame: “The hatred which my books have aroused comes back at me and gets me here,” he told a friend, tapping his chest. “If I get the better of if in one place it goes to another.”" (Today in Literature)

Greg Gerke chats it up with Paula Fox. (The Rumpus)

McCrum reminds us that the freedom and opportunities of the digital age will never truly make editors and publishers obsolete. (Guardian Books Blog)

Meanwhile, Macmillan has announced new software that will allow college instructors to rewrite textbooks. (Wall Street Journal)

Critic John Douglas Marshall reminds readers of a memoir and two novels that should not be overlooked. (The Daily Beast)

The young writers of Cavite, Philippines receive some sage advice from F. Sionil Jose. (The Philippine Star)

Motoko Rich does the math on eBooks. (NYTimes)

Carol Rumens shares a new poem of the week with text and commentary: “Last Meeting” by Gwen Harwood. (Guardian Books Blog)

R.I.P. Carlos Monemayor, Mexican author and guerilla movement scholar. (AP)

“On this day in 1862, Emily Dickinson’s “Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers” was published. This was the second of only a handful of poems published in Dickinson’s lifetime, all of them anonymously and, most think, without her knowledge. Six weeks later she sent her famous letter to the critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson: “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?”" (Today in Literature)

Andrew Anthony profiles Ian McEwan. (The Guardian)

Carolyn Kellogg teases Levi Asher’s compelling new literary mystery. (LATimes)

Agata Klapec reports on a new documentary on the life of Nobel winner Wislawa Szymborska. (AP)

Randy Kennedy joins the growing group of contortionists trying to pretzel their way into justifying plagiarism (a side-by-side pic with James Joyce? Really?). (NYTimes)

Sam Leith does his part to cement Martin Amis’ position as a literature’s sullen curmudgeon. (The National)

NPR wrestles with the notion of Ozzy Osbourne: author. (NPR)

An Agatha Christie enthusiast got more than she bargained for when she found jewelry belonging to the author’s mother tucked away in an antique trunk. (Telegraph)

Christopher Fowler turns the spotlight on yet another “forgotten author”: Dorothy Bowers. (The Independent)

AL Kennedy, Martine McCutcheon and John Sutherland debate the merits of celebrity novels. (The Observer)

“On this day in 1749 the publication of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones was announced in “The General Advertiser,” along with an apology: “It being impossible to get Sets bound fast enough to answer Demand for them, such Gentlemen and Ladies as please, may have them sew’d in Blue Paper and Boards, at the Price of 16s. a Set, of A. Millar over against Catharine-street in the Strand.”" (Today in Literature)

John Niven says (and rightly so, in my opinion) that the public needs to stop being distracted by the scandals and the haters and recognize Martin Amis as the literary giant he is. (The Independent)

Princeton announces its Firestone Library is housing five unpublished stories by JD Salinger, along with some letters. (centraljersey.com)

Emily Stokes lunches with Jonathan Safran Foer. (Financial Times)

“Christian diet book author” (odd description) scores $55,000 in a royalty dispute with Strang Communications. (Publishers Weekly)

David Tresilian visits with with the “godfather of African publishing,” James Currey. (Al-Ahram)

Jason Boog shares some interesting tidbits for weekend reading. (GalleyCat)

Johanna Seltz goes behind the scenes of the Hingham Poetry Study Group. (The Boston Globe)

“On this day in 1812 Lord Byron spoke for the first time in the House of Lords, choosing for his topic the recent Luddite rioting. Byron was twenty-four, recently returned from the obligatory Grand Tour of Europe, and ready for a career; had his speech been the success he hoped for, there is every chance that the career might have been in politics, rather than in poetry and persecution.” (Today in Literature)

Zimbabwe novelist Chenjerai Hove finds a safe haven in Miami. (Miami Herald)

Jason Boog reports on the reaction to Harriet the Spy’s “21st Century makeover.” (GalleyCat)

The Salman Rushdie archive opens today at Emory University’s Robert W. Woodruff Library. (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

David Barnett discusses how the internet has pulled back the curtain to reveal the inner workings of the publishing industry. (Guardian Books Blog)

Andrew Boryga looks for some precedence in his quest to determine the best position in which to write. (Lit Drift)

Dave Eggers continues his crusade to save newspapers. (NYTimes)

Random House making some major moves into digital operations. (Publishers Weekly)

Nintendo leaps into the eBook market with a new, larger version of its DS game system. (GalleyCat)

“On this day in 1956 Sylvia Plath described in her journal her first meeting with Ted Hughes: “…Then the worst thing happened, that big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me, who had been hunching around over women, and whose name I had asked the minute I had come into the room, but no one told me, came over and was looking hard in my eyes and it was Ted Hughes….”" (Today in Literature)

Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto inspires a new string quartet by composer Elena Ruehr. (San Jose Mercury News)

Stuart Evers explores the inspirational power of walking. (Guardian Books Blog)

Dr. Seuss goes digital. (Wired)

Jason Boog passes along the news about the launch of OffTheBookshelf.com, “a writing community where authors can build an online bookstore for their digital books.” (GalleyCat)

Russell Smith offers some commentary on the ever-strong writing advice industry. (The Globe and Mail)

Meanwhile, Laura Miller offers writers some advice from a reader’s perspective. (Salon)

Rare book dealer Kevin Johnson talks to movie poster dealer Walter Reuben about literature in film. (Seattle Post-Intelligencer)

What books are bestsellers in your city? (The Daily Beast)

A German judge has granted six publishers an injunction against filesharing site Rapidshare “to monitor and prevent the sharing of 148 books.” (GalleyCat)

“On this day in 1830 Victor Hugo’s Hernani premiered in Paris. Though the play is rarely read or staged now, the opening night is regarded as one of the most momentous in French theater history, part of a larger and most theatrical conflict between the new-wave bohemians in Hugo’s “Romantic Army” (these included Dumas, Balzac and Berlioz) and the old-guard Classicists — a conflict soon decisively won.” (Today in Literature)

Salman Rushdie planning to write memoirs recounting his days of living under a death sentence. (dnaindia.com)

Anne Boleyn: scapegoat or “common whore?” (Telegraph)

Kate Youde traces the influence of steampunk on books, fashion and film. (The Independent)

Easton Area School District challenged over the inclusion of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed in an 11th-grade Advanced Placement English class.  (lehighvalleylive.com)

Once again, women writers are ignored. (Guardian Books Blog)

JK Evanczuk points to some “spiffy” book cover designs. (Lit Drift)

The Nook and acquisition of College Booksellers have offset otherwise weak sales at Barnes & Noble. (Publishers Weekly)

Stephen Emms reaches a point of diminishing returns in David Shields’ “buzzy manifesto,” Reality Hunger. (Guardian Books Blog)

Dick Francis was buried at his home in the Caribbean yesterday. (Telegraph)

“On this day in 1809 London’s Drury Lane Theatre burned down; when those watching the spectacle from a nearby pub with theater owner-parliamentarian Richard Brinsley Sheridan remarked on his composure, he famously responded, “A man may surely take a glass of wine by his own fireside.” One-liners aside, Sheridan was most famous in his later years for a five-hour parliamentary speech which brought both sides of the House down.” (Today in Literature)

Alexandra Penney shares an excerpt from her new book, The Bag Lady Papers: The Priceless Experience of Losing It All. (The Daily Beast)

Martin Amis strikes back. (The Independent)

In light of the accusations of plagiarism against JK Rowling, Marjorie Kehe rounds up “5 interesting tales of plagiarism.” (CSMonitor.com)

Charles Pellegrino to scrub an impostor from future editions of The Last Train From Hiroshima. (Washington Post)

Will the simple joy of bookshop browsing become a thing of the past in the age of Amazon and eBooks? (Guardian Books Blog)

New Yorker editor David Remnick’s Obama book coming in April. (Miami Herald)

A rare copy of the first Superman comic book fetches a million bucks. (The Boston Globe)

Jason Boog recaps the Black Quill Awards. (GalleyCat)

Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalists have been announced. (LATimes)

Richard J. Tofel looks at how the iPad may put the final nail in the coffin of the newspaper industry. (The Daily Beast)

Despite a slow year for most formats, eBooks had one hell of a 2009—with sales jumping 176%. (Publishers Weekly)

“On this day in 1995 James Alfred Wight, better-known as James Herriot, died at the age of seventy-eight. Wight went to the Yorkshire Dales in 1940, fresh out of Glasgow Veterinary College. Over 2300 packed his memorial service in York Minster Cathedral; over 100,000 a year now visit the museum at the site of the original practice; over sixty million copies of his books have been sold.” (Today in Literature)

James D. Watts looks back at Ralph Ellison’s 40 year struggle with his “Oklahoma Book,” now released as Three Days Before the Shooting. (Tulsa World)

McCrum pushes back against the contention that 2010 is a bad time to be a writer. (The Guardian)

M.A. Orthofer introduces his latest addition to the complete review, Macedonio Fernández’s The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel). (The Literary Saloon)

Christopher Plummer talks about his portrayal of Tolstoy. (Poughkeepsie Journal)

Touré dissects the psychology of blacks who seek to pass as white through the prism of literary characters. (NYTimes)

MacAllister Stone shares the details for the 2010 Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition. (Absolute Write)

Christopher Fowler remembers Mary Renault as part of the ‘Forgotten Authors’ series. (The Independent)

Carol Rumens takes on a new poem of the week: “A Letter to a Brother of the Pen in Tribulation” by Aphra Behn. (Guardian Books Blog)

“On this day in 1903 the Canadian novelist and short story writer, Morley Callaghan was born. Though prolific and successful, Callaghan was so overlooked by the critics for much of his career that Edmund Wilson thought him “the most unjustly neglected writer in the English language.” As Hemingway discovered, he could be underestimated as a boxer, too.” (Today in Literature)

Spain to (finally) recognize poet Miguel Hernandez as a victim of Franco and not a traitor. (BBC)

Turning on Martin Amis may be one of the few growth industries these days. (The Independent)

How’s this for some Sunday reading? Ten rules for writing fiction, courtesy of Elmore Leonard, Diana Athill, Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, Helen Dunmore, Geoff Dyer, Anne Enright, Richard Ford, Jonathan Franzen, Esther Freud, Neil Gaiman, David Hare, PD James and AL Kennedy. (The Guardian: part 1 and part 2)

Writing is a dangerous business. Mark Sanderson explains. (Telegraph)

Matt Schudel remembers poet Lucille Clifton. (Washington Post)

Perry Middlemiss shares the results of the Australian Book Review’s ‘favorite Australian novel’ readers’ poll. (Matilda)

Adam Robinson makes the case that Amazon can be a losing proposition for small publishers. (HTMLGIANT)

Allston offers up some interesting literary tidbits, including that Salinger made Penguin made £4.5 million over the past nine years. (Telegraph)

M.A. Orthofer comments on The Independent’s profile of French author Anna Gavalda. (The Literary Saloon)

Orville Buddo rounds up the month’s poli-book best sellers. (NYTimes)

“On this day in 1852 Nikolai Gogol died at the age of forty-two. His unique style is a comic-tragic-absurd hybrid which has led to him being labeled the Hieronymous Bosch of Russian Literature. Having come under the sway of a fanatical priest late in life, and then been subjected to the treatments of several quack doctors, Gogol’s last days mirrored one of his bizarre stories all too closely.” (Today in Literature)

Timothy B. Tyson weighs in on Hollywood’s treatment of his book, Blood Done Sign My Name. (Wall Street Journal)

Huw Nesbitt explores the tragic set of circumstances that have locked tranlations of Borges in limbo. (Guardian Books Blog)

Jackie Collins is back with book #27. (Oneindia News)

Jake Kerridge profiles Ian McEwan on the eve of the publication of his new novel, Solar. (Telegraph)

Will Apple’s prices for eBooks be lower than we thought? (NYTimes)

The Daily Beast looks at the most avid readers and book collectors to ever occupy the Oval Office. (The Daily Beast)

Andrew Albanese recaps the Google Settlement fairness hearing. (Publishers Weekly)

M.A. Orthofer parses the Jakarta Globe’s profile of translator John McGlynn. (The Literary Saloon)

“On this day in 1909 the Italian poet F. T. Marinetti published “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” in the Paris newspaper, Le Figaro.” (Today in Literature)

Casanova’s diaries go for £4 million to an anonymous buyer. (The Guardian)

The bizarre story of Charles Laurence’s banned book. (The Daily Beast)

Zoe Ruiz chats it up with Gary Young. (The Rumpus)

Ready, set… submit! Pyr now accepting unagented submissions. (Pry-o-mania)

M.A. Orthofer examines the impact of Shanda Interactive’s purchase of Readnovel.com, “consolidating their control over the Chinese online writing scene.” (The Literary Saloon)

Paul Theroux talks eBooks with Morning Media Menu. (GalleyCat)

Scott Thill wants to measure your interest in James Cameron’s planned ‘Avatar’ novel. (Wired)

Damien G Walter issues a plea to Iain M Banks. (Guardian Books Blog)

The law of unintended consequences: blowhard Beck helps sales of anarchist book. (Publishers Weekly)

“On this day in 1947 Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano was published. The novel had been a full and difficult decade in the making — including a desperate and ultimately fatal struggle with alcohol that would at one point drive him to drink olive oil in the mistaken belief it was hair tonic — but the critics thought it comparable to Thomas Wolfe, or better than Hemingway, or second only to Joyce.” (Today in Literature)