Gay Haiku

Gay, straight, or undecided, readers will delight in Derfner’s dry sense of humor and unmistakable charm as he tackles the big questions in life:

My seventh birthday;
I weep at Barbie's Dream House.
How could you not know?

Via Grow a Brain

Lulu Titlescorer

Want to know if you've got a killer title for your novel? Now, for the first time in literary history, you can put your title to the scientific test and find out whether it has what it takes for bestseller success.

Guardian Books of the Year

What a cornucopia!

How will I ever find the time/ money/ space to read/buy/have all the books I want to read?

NY Times 100 Notable Books of the Year

Best of lists are proliferating and we haven't even had any snow yet. I'm squealing with delight - I can hardly wait to read some of these. I didn't even know there was a new Ann Tyler.

Literary Locales

More than 1,000 picture links to places that figure in the lives and writings of famous authors.

Via Coudal

Globe Top 100 Books

The Globe 100
The ninth edition of the top books of the past year, selected by Globe and Mail reviewers and editors.

Smells like literary spirit

Some people reckon sniffing books is a bit of a fishy fetish. But I scent a sweeter story, bound up with books' power to enchant. Does this get up your nose, too? More...

Classic Short Stories

This Web site is dedicated to the short story and to those interested in reading light prose. Fewer and fewer people these days read short stories. This is unfortunate--so few will ever experience the joy that reading such fine work can give. The goal of this site is to give a nice cross section of short stories in the hope that these short stories will excite these people into rediscovering this excellent source of entertainment.

I just read A Telephone Callby DOROTHY PARKER . She nailed desperation.

Read Print

I StumbledUpon this free on-line library of classics. I don't like reading books on a screen but there's a nice little selection here for those of you who do. Here are some recent additions:

The Invisible Man
The Wealth of Nations
Julius Caesar
Hamlet
Animal Farm
1984
Paradise Lost
The Origin of Species
The Canterbury Tales
Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar
Jane Eyre
Peter Pan
Pride and Prejudice
Inferno
Roughing It

Bestsellers Banned In Iran

Coincidentally I've just begun "Reading Lolita In Tehran".

Dozens of literary masterpieces and international bestsellers have been banned in Iran in a dramatic rise in censorship that has plunged the country's publishing industry into crisis.

Companies that once specialised in popular fiction and other money-spinners are being restricted to academic texts under a cultural
freeze instigated by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Several thousand new and previously published works have been blacklisted by Iran's culture and Islamic guidance ministry, which vets all books.

The Guardian

The Cupertino Effect

It turns out that the modern affliction of spellcheckers wreaking havoc on unsuspecting documents has been given a name. Following a tip from commenter Qaminante on Languagehat, I discovered that runaway spellchecking has been dubbed "the Cupertino effect," at least among writers and translators for the European Union. As Qaminante explains, the common misspelling of cooperation as cooperatino leads some spellcheckers to suggest a change to Cupertino. (One EU writer claims that the Cupertino change can even happen to the word cooperation if the word processor's custom dictionary only has the hyphenated form co-operation. However, I find it difficult to believe that many custom dictionaries out there include Cupertino but not unhyphenated cooperation.)

Via Kottke

The Mineral Palace

The Mineral Palace is the first novel by Heidi Julavits. It's a lot more earthbound than The Effects of Living Backwards, an Alice In Wonderland tale that I read in December 2005. For some reason there's no permalink to it - thanks Blogger. If you want to read my take on it (though I can't imagine why) you'll have to check my archives. Anyhow, this is a novel of Bena and Ted Jonsson, a young couple with a newborn, who move from Minnesota to Pueblo, Colorado where Ted has found a medical position. The Great Depression is at its height. Pueblo is a bleak, dusty, disheartened town that, like most towns, hides some dirty secrets. Little thrives there including Bena and Ted's marriage which is as empty as the hot, dusty streets. Cattle starve to death and are piled in a midden, buffalo jump off cliffs, dogs die and babies, too. Corruption and perversion thrive. At times the book seems to be veering towards cliche but, overall, Julavits manages to skirt this pitfall. If you're looking to be uplifted avoid this book. It's dark and tragic but incredibly moving and the writing is very,very good.

The Wooden Library at Alnarp

This is a different sort of library. The wooden library, or xylothek (from the Greek words for tree, xylon, and storing place, theke) consists of 217 volumes describing 213 different species or varieties of trees and shrubs.

Via Woods Lot

Book Covers

Another book-related blog... this one features Book Covers.
Via Swiss Miss

Another cool bookish site

Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie featuring (surprise, surprise) lots of pictures of bookplates.
Via Metafilter

Seen Reading

Seen Reading is a cool blog:

What Is Seen Reading?
1. I see you reading.
2. I guesstimate where you are in the book.
3. I trip on over to the bookstore and make a note of the text.
4. I let my imagination rip.
5. Readers become celebrities.
6. People get giddy and buy more books.

William Styron dies

A lifelong liberal, Styron was involved in many public causes, from supporting a Connecticut teacher suspended for refusing to say the oath of allegiance, to advocating human rights for Jews in the Soviet Union. In the 90s, he was one of a group of authors and historians who successfully opposed plans for a Disney theme park near the Manassas National Battlefield in northern Virginia.
Styron found writing an increasing struggle in his latter years. He was reportedly working on a military novel, yet published no full-length work of fiction after Sophie's Choice, which came out in 1979. He remained well-connected, however, socialising with President Clinton in Martha's Vineyard, and joining Arthur Miller and Gabriel Garcia Marquez on a delegation that met with Cuban leader Fidel Castro in 2000.
The son of a shipbuilder, Styron was born in Newport News, Virginia, to a family whose history extended to colonial Virginia. He was awed by the fiction of fellow southerner Thomas Wolfe, and knew by his late teens that he wanted to be a writer. His own life offered strong material. At age 13, his mother died, transforming him into a 'hell-raiser' with an unhealable wound of guilt. He served as a lieutenant in the US marines during the second world war and was stationed in Okinawa in 1945.
'Some of my problems I think came from a continuing anguish over my mother's death. If I had gotten shot it would have been, I suppose, some kind of completion. It's hard to say how that would have worked out,' Styron told the Associated Press in a 1990 interview. 'When I was a young marine platoon leader, there was this incredible sense of fate. The myth at that age is you're going to live forever. Well, I never believed that and my friends didn't. I thought I was going to die."

Writer tells of sorrow for men who robbed her

As an 82-year-old woman confronted by four fit young men out to rob her Johannesburg home, Nadine Gordimer might have been paralysed by terror.
But Gordimer won a Nobel prize for literature in 1991 for her insights into South Africa's racial and economic divides. So as the thieves grabbed the author and her 66-year-old domestic worker she was overcome more by sympathy than fear. 'One grabbed me and had his arm across me. It was a muscular, smooth arm and I thought, 'Shouldn't there be a better use for these hands, this arm, than robbing an old woman?' What a waste of four young men. They should have jobs,' she said.