“Just One Catch” is a soup-to-nuts chronicle of the life of Joseph Heller. It is by Tracy Daugherty, who should not be confused with Mr. Heller’s daughter.

Ever find yourself on a gloomy, rainy day with no coin in hand, nothing to do and cabin fever setting in? Why not try what I (and it turns out several homeless folks do to get out of the weather) do to pass such time? I saunter to my local used book store and mine the shelves for lost treasure.

See, while some collect books, I just collect the titles. They take up less space and I can bring them with me where ever I go. Below are the most interesting book titles I found on a recent outing. You can prctice this hobby at your library as well, and they'll even let you take the books home for a time. For Free-zies! But I find the government funded libraries just can't compare to the collective castoffs of the private sector.

I can't imagine my library stocking gems like these: 

Alien Abductees Handbook

How to Enjoy Sex while Conscious

Handbook of Underwater Acoustics

How to Read a Book

Psychological Effects Preventing Nuclear War

Population Control through Nuclear Pollution

How to Make a Moron

Headhunting in the Solomon Islands

Elephants in pink Tutus

The Screwing of the Average Man

1978 Oahu Bus Schedule

Advice from a Failure

Suture Self

Superfluous Hair and Its Removal

Josephine Hart, an Irish-born novelist whose best-selling tale of erotic obsession, “Damage,” inspired the 1992 feature film of that name starring Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche, died on Thursday in London. Ms.

Starting Aug. 31, DC Comics will begin a sweeping relaunch of all 52 of its titles, the company said on its official blog Tuesday.

Short stories are one of fiction's most vital and necessary exports, though often they are not read with the frequency or fervor of longer novels. Stories are seen as gateway writing: get a story published in a venerable literary magazine, get a book deal. Publish a debut book of short stories, and a novel may not be far away. Many readers (and writers) still see novels as the great accomplishment, with stories as an appetizer. And no one will doubt that The Great Gatsby is a superior work of art to The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Fitzgerald's primary gift to the world. But I'd still take one Fitzgerald short story over several other authors' full-length books to an island.

  & I've fallen in love with my Chinese librarian who always gives me more hours on the computer. I hope she doesn't shoot me down. I'll just bring her a rose one day. Ask her out for coffee or chai if she takes. But she knows the look.

New author? Don't want to compete with the bestselling might of Stephenie Meyer or Stieg Larsson? Then why not try Andrew Kessler's approach, and set up a bookshop that stocks only one title: your own.

Simon & Schuster has created a Facebook app called Book Battle, a literary version of hotornot.com. Users can vote on book covers, games, authors or characters, which will be presented in slide-show format.

In The "S" Word, John Nichols has written an imaginative history of socialism as an idea and a movement in and throughout U.S. history.

Writing in bed is not just about convenience or comfort. I think there's a psychological advantage, too. If you write in bed in the early morning (as I do occasionally) you occupy an intriguing part of consciousness, somewhere between dreaming and wakefulness. Part of you is still in the shadowy cave of dream world; part of you is adjusting to the sharp brightness of reality. The mixture is fruitful and often suggestive.

This year, National Poetry Month brings an ambitious collaboration: a cross-country relay race of 54 poets contributing to one poem about America. The practice is known as renga, an ancient Japanese tradition of collaborative poetry in which one poet writes his or her lines then hands it off to the next.

Disturbing signs suggest that the book trade hasn't simply migrated online. Some of it has disappeared altogether.

"The Use and Abuse of Literature," the latest book by the prolific Harvard literary scholar Marjorie Garber, is in part about this "centripetal movement" in artistic appreciation "from the edges to the center, from the outside to the inside, incorporating once disparaged genres and authors into respectable, canonical and even classic status." We've all seen the process applied to television and cinema and comic books (now called, in a Maileresque turn, "graphic novels"), but Garber reminds us that this tendency has existed throughout history, bringing biography and Renaissance drama (Garber's primary academic specialty) and even the novel itself in from the cold, along with private forms like letters and journals that never wished for such consideration. "What once wasn't literature," Garber writes, "is now at the heart of the canon."

The first book written by Dublin's latest literary star had nothing to do with his home city at all. A sprawling state-of-the-nation saga, promisingly titled Your Granny Is a Hunger Striker, it languishes these days in his archive in the National Library, doomed to remain unread. "It's never been published and it never will be," Roddy Doyle says now, nearly 30 years after he wrote it. "Because it's utter @!$%#e. I sent it to every agent and publisher I could find – and either it wasn't coming back, or it was coming back unopened. There's nothing at all in it of the area I grew up in. It's absent."

Abraham Rothberg, an author whose works, most of them fiction, roamed from the ghettos of medieval Prague through the counterculture upheavals of America in the 1960s to the machinations of Soviet Communism, died on March 28 at his home in Rochester. He was 89.

With local independent bookstores like A Different Light in the Castro and Modern Times in the Mission struggling to make ends meet, not to mention Borders' bankruptcy and the general panic of the book publishing industry in the face of the e-reader, it would seem that literary pursuits of all kinds are under attack in this digital age.

But literary journals — a long-tail publishing phenomenon before the Internet made other niche offerings accessible — are thriving.

In some sense, the answer to that question is, really, "Who cares?" Because actually reading the book—sitting down with it and curling up with it, beside a roaring fire or whatnot—seems, somehow, beside the point. Write More Good is an artifact as much as a piece of literature, the kind of thing you might find displayed on a table in the Ironical Kitsch section of Urban Outfitters, piled next to Awkward Family Photos and a picked-over array of Mr. T bobbleheads. The book's physicality—the fact that it exists in the first place—is itself part of the joke.

Guggenheim Fellowships are awarded annually to poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers who are residents of the United States and Canada "on the basis of achievement and exceptional promise." Last year's awards averaged $36,857 each.

In the spring of 2008, shortly after he started reading Infinite Jest, my friend Francis got in touch to say a) he found the book astonishing, everything I'd said it was, one of the greatest literary works of all time; b) but when he got to the ending – 981 pp. body copy, another 96 of small-print endnotes – did I think he was going to think it was worth it? No, I said, the ending's infuriating, and although the author denied it and I haven't made a study of the available papers, I still suspect it was to some extent an afterthought, a way of ducking out of a project that, without it, would maybe never have ended at all.

The author, James Jones, objected to the changes at the time, arguing in a letter to his editor at Scribner that "the things we change in this book for propriety's sake will in five years, or ten years, come in someone else's book anyway." But eventually he gave in to his publisher.

Sixty years later Mr. Jones's estate has made a deal to reissue a digital version of the book that restores those cuts. The book is still in print.

Borders presented a restructuring plan to its creditors on Wednesday that promised publishers and landlords a sleeker, more efficient company poised to emerge successfully from bankruptcy through increased online sales and revamped stores.

The Washington State–based literary journal Bellingham Review is offering an extension for submissions to its poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction contests. Having received fewer submissions than they have in the past, the journal opted to accept entries until April 15.

Among David Foster Wallace's papers at the Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin are three hundred-odd books from his personal library, most of them annotated, some heavily as if he were scribbling a dialogue with the author page by page. There are several of his undergraduate papers from Amherst; drafts of his fiction and non-fiction; research materials; syllabi; notes, tests and quizzes from classes he took, and from those he taught; fan correspondence and juvenilia. As others have found, it's entirely boggling for a longtime fan to read these things. I recently spent three days in there and have yet to cram my eyeballs all the way back in where they belong.
[...]
One surprise was the number of popular self-help books in the collection, and the care and attention with which he read and reread them. I mean stuff of the best-sellingest, Oprah-level cheesiness and la-la reputation was to be found in Wallace's library. Along with all the Wittgenstein, Husserl and Borges, he read John Bradshaw, Willard Beecher, Neil Fiore, Andrew Weil, M. Scott Peck and Alice Miller. Carefully.

Just before National Poetry Month kicked off last week, word began to spread about a major new poetry prize out of Canada. The fifty-thousand-dollar Montreal International Poetry Prize, funded by an anonymous donor, isn't honoring a poet's lifetime achievement or a major new book, but a single poem.

On the evidence of classroom discussion, the vast majority of my incoming students seem to have only read those three books. In fact, affirmative teaching – teaching to exams – often means these students also know the same five things about those three books. It doesn't make for a wide-ranging conversation.

By March 30, when Amazon began shipping The Pale King to customers, Little, Brown's attempt to control the book's rollout would look downright laughable. Still, the results were the same. Practically every media organ in America was scrambling to cover Wallace. And one sort of has to wonder: at what point did an unfinished manuscript by a writer of avant-garde commitments and Rogetian prolixity and high Heideggerian seriousness (and footnotes) become a genuine pop-cultural event?

I used the analogy of the knife drawer - we all know which is the sharpest knife in our kitchen and invariably reach for it, bypassing the duller blades.  Writers should reach for the sharpest words possible - precision, focus, tone are the writer's sharp blades.

Good tips in here.

His posthumous unfinished novel, "The Pale King" — which is set largely in an I.R.S. office in the Midwest — depicts an America so plagued by tedium, monotony and meaningless bureaucratic rules and regulations that its citizens are in danger of dying of boredom.

The finalists for the Man Booker International Prize have been announced, but if one nominee's wishes were honored, the shortlist would have to be clipped further. Best-selling author John le Carré has refused his nomination for the prize honoring achievement in fiction, saying simply that, while flattered by the recognition, he does not compete for literary awards.

People often ask the annual Booker judges: "How many books did you read?" With the International prize there is no answer other than "thousands", for the prize honours a lifelong achievement in writing, and is tested by the judges' lifelong achievement in reading. But if you must: how many have I read since we began? The answer is 200-ish. And I've enjoyed almost every one, because if I didn't I just moved on to something better. We'd agreed to test to strength: no matter that some of a writer's output is of lesser quality, as long as the heights are majestic.

A state in western India has banned Pulitzer-prize-winning Joseph Lelyveld's new book about Mahatma Gandhi after reviews said it hints that the father of India's independence had a homosexual relationship.

Zone 3 Press, housed at Austin Peay State University in Tennessee, is accepting entries for a new book competition "open to anyone who can carve an artful exposition, drive a factual narrative, or strum a lyric sentence." One creative nonfiction manuscript will be selected for publication by the press, and the winning writer will receive one thousand dollars.

Former Washington Post reporters Bradley Graham and his wife Lissa Muscatine are purchasing the iconic upper Northwest bookstore, which has continued to turn a profit despite catastrophic change in the bookselling industry.

What follows is a sampler of literary catastrophe. Don't run away. It's not as depressing as it sounds. One of the enduring paradoxes of great apocalyptic writing is that it consoles even as it alarms.

This has been, in fact, one of the enduring "social" functions of literature — specifically, of poetry. Narrative prose is less well suited to the task. This isn't surprising: narrative implies continuity and order — events that flow forth in comprehensible sequence, driven by motive forces of cause and effect.

The value of this magically convenient library book — otherwise known as an e-book — is the subject of a fresh and furious debate in the publishing world. For years, public libraries building their e-book collections have typically done so with the agreement from publishers that once a library buys an e-book, it can lend it out, one reader at a time, an unlimited number of times.

Last week, that agreement was upended by HarperCollins Publishers when it began enforcing new restrictions on its e-books, requiring that books be checked out only 26 times before they expire.

I understand the need to find a commercially viable business model, but this comes off as excessively limiting. Is there a reason a simple model can't be developed using data on how often libraries naturally replace print copies due to wear and loss?

Why would a novel be, in Chabon's parlance, "wrecked"? Authors, always sensitive creatures, might abandon a book in a fit of despair, as Stephenie Meyer initially did in 2008 with her "Twilight" spinoff "Midnight Sun," which she declared herself "too sad" to finish after 12 chapters leaked to the Internet. More dramatically, in 1925 Evelyn Waugh burned his unpublished first novel, "The Temple at Thatch," and attempted to drown himself in the sea after a friend gave it a bad review. (Stung by jellyfish, Waugh soon returned to shore.) More dramatically still, Nikolai Gogol died a mere 10 days after burning the manuscript of "Dead Souls II," for the second time.

Today I rarely read anything — book, magazine, newspaper — without a writing instrument in hand. Books have become my journals, my critical notebooks, my creative outlets. Writing in them is the closest I come to regular meditation; marginalia is — no exaggeration — possibly the most pleasurable thing I do on a daily basis.

Let's agree, shall we, to keep throwing around the inane term Great American Novel, and to never, ever utter the phrase Great American Novella. Let's agree not to remind California what it used to take for granted, that novellas, because of their length, can often be more handily adapted than novels into movies. Let us not remind New York what all the avid and demanding among us take for granted, that a volume of three novellas is more intriguing than one flabby novel

Long-form journalism is the only homegrown American literary form. I'm talking about the kind of journalism that, in an effort by writers to conceal how radically they're blurring the fact-fiction line, is innocently labeled "narrative nonfiction" in journalism schools and M.F.A. programs. Narrative nonfiction typically conforms to the artfully narrow standards of American fact checking (another indigenous art) while enjoying what Dwight Macdonald once called the "atmospheric license" of fiction. Some of the most beautiful and illuminating writing in all of American English is narrative nonfiction.

When we meet Joshua Foer, his memory is "nothing special." A year later, he is able to memorize the order of a shuffled deck of cards in less than two minutes and the names of 99 people he's just met. He has also etched in his brain images of his friend urinating on Pope Benedict's skullcap, of Rhea Perlman involved in indelicate acts with Manute Bol, and of other things most of us would try hard to forget. Let it never be claimed that there is no cost to self-improvement.

The bestselling children's author Julia Donaldson, whose signature rhyming picture books dominate top 10 lists, has revealed that she vetoed an ebook version of her most famous title, The Gruffalo, because she thinks interactive book apps for children are a bad idea.

Several of those who came to hear Margaret Drabble discuss The Millstone at the Guardian book club recalled reading it soon after it was published in 1965. "Reading it again made me feel quite young," said one, who, like others, remembered the film, in which Sandy Dennis played Rosamund and a young Ian McKellen played the epicene George. Remembering the film, for which Drabble wrote the screenplay, prompted discussion of the novel's title. This had puzzled the filmmakers, who called the film version A Touch of Love in Britain but weirdly – as one of its cast, Eleanor Bron, who was in our audience, recalled – Thank You All Very Much in the US. (The phrase is Rosamund's sarcastic rejoinder upon being examined in hospital by a gaggle of medical students.) So why The Millstone?

Nabokov admits to one failing: a "lack of spontaneity". Pedantic, bombastic, but always worth reading.

To me what's most striking reading my mother's memoir is the stylish chasm between their world and ours, the pleasurable sensation that we have progressed. But is the literary scene completely different from our own? It is different, surely, and a 25-year-old like my mother would feel entirely comfortable harboring writerly ambitions of her own. However, if you go to a Paris Review party on White Street, or an N+1 party, you will still find the young male novelist, now ironic, self-deprecating, exquisitely confident, in his plaid shirt and glasses, just back from Buenos Aires, maybe, and the girls who eagerly orbit him. So there is still a certain amount of accommodating, affirming female energy circling the male editors and writers; a certain male radiance to be fed off of and deferred to and seduced.

Would we meet any would-be female novelists at these parties?

In the past year Ms. Hocking, a 26-year-old from Minnesota, became an indie heroine in the literary world for publishing nine books that sold a total of more than one million copies, nearly all of them in e-book form, earning almost $2 million for her efforts.

The Vilcek Foundation has selected poet Charles Simic and fiction writer Dinaw Mengestu as recipients of the sixth annual Vilcek Prizes honoring foreign-born writers, artists, and scientists now living in the United States. Former U.S. poet laureate and recent Robert Frost Medal–winner Simic, born in the former Yugoslavia, received the one-hundred-thousand-dollar prize for lifetime achievement, and Mengestu, born in Ethiopia, won the twenty-five-thousand-dollar prize for creative promise.

Among the more frequent submissions Madison receives to her site: "haha" changes into "Shabaka," who was actually an Egyptian pharaoh; "hell" morphs into "he'll"; "pick me up" turns into "oil me up." And it's easy to see how the autocorrect of "kids" into "LSD" could cause a bit of confusion and concern.

Prof. Katherine Rowe's blue-haired avatar was flying across a grassy landscape to a virtual three-dimensional re-creation of the Globe Theater, where some students from her introductory Shakespeare class at Bryn Mawr College had already gathered online. Their assignment was to create characters on the Web site Theatron3 and use them to block scenes from the gory revenge tragedy "Titus Andronicus," to see how setting can heighten the drama.

"The Netherlands" isn't the only story about disaster and lost control in Jim Shepard's new collection, You Think That's Bad, though it might be the most striking one. Shepard, author of the acclaimed story collections Love and Hydrogen (2004) and Like You'd Understand, Anyway (2007), is a master not only of the short story, but also of the prose of pain, disappointment and powerlessness. Each of the 11 stories in his new book is heartbreaking and true, and not one is less than perfect.

The new ebook lending community site Lendle, set up last month to take advantage of Amazon's free Kindle ebook loan facility, has gone off-line after having its API access revoked by Amazon. The site's homepage now warns users the service is "unavailable indefinitely".

Michael Gove has come back from the US with a laudable, but badly formulated, idea that "our children should be reading 50 books a year". Gove is a passionate advocate for excellence in music and literature, but this is silly. Well-intentioned, but utterly wrong-headed. Anyone with children will know that.

I am almost neurotically law-abiding, but there is one area of life where I am an outlaw, beyond the pale, a fugitive from justice. I only do it in pencil, and sometimes I remember to rub it out, but … I write in library books. Those spaces down the sides of the page seem so inviting that the impulse to anoint them with scribbles is irresistible. History is on my side: until the 19th century books were often used as scrap paper, and few people had qualms about scrawling on a pristine copy. No jury in the land would convict me. Books are meant to be written on.

Confession: I write in margins. Only paperbacks, though.

Kansas-born poet Ben Lerner, author of Mean Free Path (2010), Angle of Yaw (2006), and The Lichtenberg Figures (2004), has become the first American poet to win the Preis für International Poesie der Stadt Münster, a poetry translation award given biennially by the city of Münster, Germany.

The former C.I.A. officers describe why they chose to become spies, how they fell in love while working undercover and what drove them to leave "the life." Along the way, they recount the adrenaline and tedium, the danger and deception, that mark a career in espionage.

In an era when publicity departments hotly compete with editors for space in the offices of financially challenged publishing houses, the old adage about how you shouldn't judge a book by its cover is truer than ever. But what about titles? Surely it isn't unreasonable to expect that a book with Jerusalem in its name — twice! — will be about . . . Jerusalem. But alas, James Carroll's "Jerusalem, Jerusalem" is not really about that ancient city, and despite what its subtitle suggests, it has next to nothing to say about how Jerusalem "ignited our modern world."

We are all familiar with the five stages of memoir: myth, trauma, revelation, redemption, book contract. In his wonderful memoir, "Almost a Family," John Darnton has taken this modern form to a new level.

Information, he argues, is more than just the contents of our overflowing libraries and Web servers. It is "the blood and the fuel, the vital principle" of the world. Human consciousness, society, life on earth, the cosmos — it's bits all the way down.

Former CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson is turning to fiction writing more than three years after publishing a memoir about her career.

Men. Who needs 'em? Colleges don't. Employers don't. Women don't. Even their own parents don't. At least, that's how it feels to a lot of guys, according to prominent social critic Kay Hymowitz's controversial new book, "Manning Up."

What this Dallas-based divorced mother does have, however, is the sort of bizarre, twist-filled back story that makes everyone who hears it pay attention. She was born into and raised as a member of the cult Children of God (now called the Family International), founded by David Berg. Growing up, she bounced from city to city, often living in cramped and impoverished conditions, rarely spending more than a few months at a stretch at one of the cult's dozens of communes around the world.

The PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, which offers a prize of fifteen thousand dollars, was announced yesterday. MacArthur "Genius" Fellow Deborah Eisenberg received the honor, for which she will be feted at a ceremony in May, for The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (Picador). The four other finalists, including recent National Book Critics Circle Award winner Jennifer Egan, will receive five thousand dollars each.

And also if you're a writer — or someone who aspires to be a writer — then you must read these letters, arcing from about the age of 17 to about a year shy of his death at the age of 89, so that you might see what goes into such a being's being.

What would US workers say if they had a public voice?

The demonstrations in Madison may give us an idea, but, apart from uprisings like this one, American workers have had little or no public voice since the Reagan era. The 19th- and early 20th-century tradition of workers writing their own stories and putting out their own newspapers is long gone. In situations of organised struggle, such as we've been witnessing in Wisconsin and Indiana, workers can find a collective voice and break the silence. But these situations are rare.

The Tiger's Wife takes place in an unnamed Balkan country — closest in character to the former Yugoslavia, where Obreht was born. Natalia, a young medical student, is on her way to an orphanage in enemy territory when she learns that her beloved grandfather has died. Though his wife had no idea he was sick, Natalia was his confidant — not only was she aware of his cancer; she was privy to his many incredible adventures, the two most fantastic being the stories of the Deathless Man and the Tiger's Wife.

Read a sample of this in a journal, check it out.

Like their high-street equivalents, these idiosyncratic adornments to local shopping are a disappearing species

Josh Ritter has been telling stories brilliantly with a guitar and a terrific band for a long time, and now the 34-year-old singer has written his first novel. The book is titled Bright's Passage, and you can download the first chapter here:

I'll interview Ritter about his novel, how it differs from storytelling in song and more at SXSW's Interactive Conference (Austin Convention Center Ballroom G) on Tuesday, March 14. I'm halfway through the book and loving it.

More than 60 years since Hans Fallada's international bestseller Alone in Berlin was published, readers will be able to digest the unabridged version for the first time.

Germany's Aufbau publishing house recently dug out Fallada's original manuscript from its archive, only to find there was an extra chapter, and a rather different story. They decided to reprint the novel as Fallada originally wrote it.

For six weeks, at a cost of $7,000, Columbia University offers recent college graduates forgettable workshops, fleeting encounters with important editors and access to the best unlisted job openings in book publishing and magazines. After swift job placement, these hyper-literate 20-somethings occupy a peculiar professional class: the Assisterati. Their institutional affiliations lend them a sense that they are the caretakers, soon to be inheritors, of a sublime patrimony. Their proximity to literary creation—via email, telephone or fax—suggests they possess a cultural credibility they couldn't acquire in, say, Chicago, or on Wall Street. Underpaid but brimming with hope, they, like the people they assist, will one day run this town and steer the course of American literature. That is, if they stick around with their egos intact.  

The winner of the 2011 Story Prize, the annual ten-thousand-dollar award for a collection of short fiction, was announced on Wednesday night. Idaho author Anthony Doerr received the honor for his fourth book and second story collection, Memory Wall (Scribner), a series of stories investigating memory and its relation to sense of self.

What does giving birth feel like? It's become a pressing question for me, as I'm due to do it myself in five weeks' time. No one can give me an answer. "Oh, it's an unforgettable experience," mums coo. Then add, "I can't describe it; you forget the pain." Make your mind up!

Can literature provide an answer? Surely one of the greats has nailed it, and can explain how an event can be simultaneously unforgettable and impossible to remember?

Jay Landesman, a writer and editor whose journal Neurotica analyzed the anxieties of postwar America and whose Broadway musical, "The Nervous Set," has been called the first (and only) Beat musical, died on Feb. 20 at his home in London. He was 91.

On the face of it, you might think that this relatively new, rapidly developing art form would be exciting and fertile territory for authors. There's scope for experimentation in the ability to, say, explore multiple narrative strands, to make mistakes and start again, to work in puzzles. There's also the surely attractive chance to encounter the kind of predominantly young male demographic that traditional book publishers have such trouble reaching. And, of course, there's the oodles of cash you stand to make if you can just keep hold of the rights.

As every poet knows, words begin in the mouth before they hit the page, and it is our experience of learning language. The King James karaoke nights, common to households where long familiarity with the stories meant that everyone joined in the refrains, built a confidence with language that the educated classes prefer to imagine as their own. My dad left school at 12, and never learned to read properly. He had no trouble with his Bible, and when he didn't understand a word or a construction, he asked Mrs Winterson or the minister. He was a man of few words himself, but he had dignity of speech, learned directly from the King James.

You can count on one hand with four digits left over the times I've agreed with the n+1 kids, and here it is - Sheila Heti is, indeed, the bomb.  I've been a fan since her novel Ticknor became my first print review back in the day, and have been waiting eagerly for another novel.  As the Observer reported while I was slowly drowning last month, she had been struggling to find a US publisher.  Well, Bookforum informs us that How Should a Person Be will be published at last by Holt.  I'm reading it at this very moment (well, not this very moment, obviously) and can confirm that the praise is deserved.  

Why do magazines and periodicals review many more books written by men than women, and choose many more men than women to review them?

That ongoing debate was re-energized by a survey of major publications' 2010 records that was posted online last week by the grassroots women's literary group VIDA. The most lopsided male-to-female ratio belonged to one of the most influential literary publications, The New York Review of Books, with a tally of 462 male bylines to 79 female, a nearly 6-to-1 ratio. The Atlantic published many more male bylines than female (154 vs. 55), but it reviewed more books by women than men (19 to 13). The New Yorker reviewed 36 books by men and nine by women, while Harpers reviewed more than twice as many books by men as by women. You get the idea.

As the new year rages on with news of political unrest abroad, PenTales, a New York City–based organization dedicated to furthering global dialogue through stories, has announced a short story contest on the theme of "revolt." The competition welcomes entries from around the globe (written in or translated into English) that offer unique perspective on the topic.

There was a time when you had to earn the right to draft a memoir, by accomplishing something noteworthy or having an extremely unusual experience or being such a brilliant writer that you could turn relatively ordinary occur­rences into a snapshot of a broader historical moment. Anyone who didn't fit one of those categories was obliged to keep quiet. Unremarkable lives went unremarked upon, the way God intended.

But then came our current age of oversharing, and all heck broke loose. These days, if you're planning to browse the "memoir" listings on Amazon, make sure you're in a comfortable chair, because that search term produces about 40,000 hits, or 60,000, or 160,000, depending on how you execute it.

Borders, the struggling book chain, said on Sunday night that it would delay more payments to its vendors and landlords as it tried to preserve cash and avoid bankruptcy.

One year after J.D. Salinger's death, we know little more about him than we did in his lifetime. That has not kept outsiders from trying, or insiders from resisting.

Joe Gores, a crime writer whose spare, chiseled sentences and deadpan dialogue put him squarely in the Dashiell Hammett tradition and persuaded Hammett's daughter to let him write a follow-up to "The Maltese Falcon," died on Monday in Greenbrae, Calif.

THE concept for establishing a collaborative enclave for writers is not new, but Marmaduke Writing Factory, a recently formed collective of professional writers here, has expanded that idea to include interaction with the general public.

The list of the top 10 best-selling books of 2010 from Barnes & Noble and the list of overall top 10 best-selling books from Amazon.com (including Kindle) demonstrate some significant differences in reading preferences between readers of physical books and readers of all books, including e-books. Most significantly, the memoir of former President George W. Bush, "Decision Points," was ranked number one on the Barnes & Noble list, but did not place on the Amazon.com list. The fictional thriller "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest," by late Swedish author Stieg Larsson, topped the Amazon.com list and ranked number four on the Barnes & Noble list.

Throughout the book — 219 times in all — the word "@!$%#" is replaced by "slave," a substitution that was made by NewSouth Books, a publisher based in Alabama, which plans to release the edition in February.

The arrival of the Coen brothers' movie "True Grit" on Wednesday is likely to bring Charles Portis a new surge of attention he has no use for. Mr. Portis, the author of the 1968 novel on which the new film is based (as was the 1969 John Wayne version) is allergic to fame.

"The most revolutionary consciousness is to be found among the most ruthlessly exploited classes: animals, trees, water, air, grasses." -- Gary Snyder

Every night for the last two weeks, I have dreamed of the Hurtling Moons of Barsoom. I awake in the morning, still feeling the Martian dust, smelling the canned air of my pressure suit, with my heart still pounding from the battle against the Martians that I have just left.

I used to have dreams like that all the time, back when I was but a young lad. I was Innes, traveling with Abner Perry on his mole to the center of the earth, fighting the Mahar in Pellucidar. I was Bowen Tyler, braving the wilds of Caprona. I was Private Juan Rico, of Rasczak’s Roughnecks, dropping on Klendathu to fight the bugs.

Excitement. Thrills. Peril. These were my daily companions. Looking forward at life, I saw nothing but an endless adventure awaiting.

Somewhere along the line, however, I grew up. High School, the Military, marriage, kids, jobs, and everyday life all entered the picture, and somehow I never made it to Luna City, much less the outer reaches. I settled down to an ordinary life, a bit less spectacular.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I love my children, and have loved every single second of being a father. Loved every second individually, as they have passed. Even the hard ones. And, I have loved each minute of over two decades with my wife, and would not trade one second of it for a lifetime on Golden Rule as a single man.

But, I do dream of Golden Rule. It’s there that I meet Gwen, and she looks a lot like my wife. And at the end, while I bemoan the loss of my foot, and try to tend the wounds of my beloved Gwen, it is my wife’s lovely brown eyes that I am looking into.

I think this is my midlife crisis manifesting itself. I am reverting back to the adventure seeking boy that I was. Dreaming of the books I read and wishing for the thrill that I had when I would read them.

I do still experience it sometimes, even now. I have accompanied Jack Ryan on many harrowing adventures. There were a couple of times that I thought we weren’t going to pull through, but somehow we made it. I cannot count the number of lonely roads that I have walked down with Jack Reacher. He and I have made it through some extremely touchy situations, and I thank God that he had my back.

You know, it’s funny, but I am the only man I know who feels this way. I have talked to many of my friends, and coworkers, and they seem to have lost the hunger for adventure that we had when we were boys. I have asked them, and they all seem to be too old, or too grown up, to be interested in these things. But I am not. I still want to go look for Captain Flint’s treasure. What's funny about this is that sometimes I am Jim Hawkins, and sometimes I am Long John Silver. I am not sure what that says about me, but I am sure that it means something.

Anyway, I have been dreaming about these things lately, and I just wanted to get it off my chest. I think it might just be the winter setting in, and the realization that I am not going to be able to do any hunting this year, and fishing is pretty much over until spring. Maybe it’s just that my job is a bit of a grind, and this is my mind’s way of compensating for it. Or maybe it is a full blown mid life crisis, and I am anxious for the day in a few years when my wife and I are on our own, kids gone, and chuck it all away and hit the road.

I don’t know.

But, this weekend, I think I will stack a few cups and await Rufo. Perhaps he will show up, and we can wander the Glory Road together, he with his bow and me with The Lady Vivamus sheathed on my hip. I dream of this sometimes, too, and every single time, when I meet Star she has the deepest brown eyes I have ever seen, and I feel as if I am drowning in them.

And, sometimes, when I am feeling especially clever, I can make her laugh.

"I shall make a terrible old man, I fear," the English-American novelist Christopher Isherwood confided to his diary during the summer of 1961. He was only 56, but his fading looks and fear of being alone terrified him.

Every fall, the Literary Review in Britain hands out its Bad Sex in Fiction Award, a sniggering exercise that generates plenty of press, mostly because the nominees are selected from the ranks of highly praised novelists. Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer and John Updike have been "winners" since the award was founded in the early 1990s, but more often than not the (non-)honor goes to the least-famous name among a list of the celebrated. (There appears to be some basis for the rumor that the prize is given to whomever is a good enough sport to show up for the ceremony.) This year, Rowan Somerville won it (for his novel "The Shape of Her") but the nominations of Jonathan Franzen and former Tony Blair spokesman Alastair Campbell are what garnered the most attention before the winner was announced last night at ... wait for it ... the In & Out Club in London.

Norris Church Mailer, the former model who married Norman Mailer and managed his career and his family life over three decades while carving out her own niche as a writer, died on Sunday at her home in Brooklyn Heights. She was 61.

This is the second book in a trilogy about two vampires, Jody and Tommy. In this, the second book, Jody has turned Tommy into a vampire without asking him first. Tommy is just learning to make adjustments into being a vampire when the Emperor of San Francisco, a homeless man with two dogs who looks after the city, discovers his secret and tells one of his co-workers that Tommy is now a creature of the night. The co-worker, Clint, promptly tells the two detectives who were investigating the vampire murders in the last book, as well as a hooker that the rest of the Animals who work at the Safeway with Tommy have picked up.

The hooker, known as "Blue" because she has painted herself much like the "Blue Man Group", wants to become a vampire too. Now Tommy and Jody are being hunted by the Emperor, the old vampire, the two detectives and the hooker. What a life! During this time it is decided that Tommy and Jody need to recruit a new minion capable of being out and about during the day. Enter Abby Normal, whose writing is that of a teenager in love with a vampire (Tommy) that will have you in stitches.

The entire tale is set in San Francisco again. The writing is hysterical and keeps your interest throughout the entire book. Christopher Moore has done it again in this fascinating sequel to "Bloodsucking Fiends".

The thesis of Ken Miller's succinct and very readable book Only a Theory is that the evolution/creationism controversy that has been playing out in schools, school boards, legislatures, and courts across the United States is more than a heated but circumscribed skirmish between  …

Aspinwall, Pennsylvania-based Black Lawrence Press, an imprint of Dzanc Books and sponsor of two contests for poetry and short story collections, has just launched a novel publication prize. The Big Moose Prize, open for entries now, will award one thousand dollars and publication of the winning book, and finalists will also be considered for publication.

I got in to a big tussle over this issue when I wrote a letter to the editor of the largest local paper here. My basic argument was "All information was and is a form of manipulation"!

Well, open for discussion. The big question series.

It's National Novel Writing Month! Some people criticize the concept, claiming that novels written in under a month aren't going to be worth the paper they're printed on. But there are plenty of examples to prove the naysayers wrong. In fact, many classic, bestselling novels were penned within this time frame. While these authors completed these fine pieces of literature without the motivation of National Novel Writing Month, they still serve as an excellent example to those hoping to complete their own works this November.

These days Brooklyn has enough writers and publishing professionals to inspire a "Brooklyn Literary 100" list in The New York Observer, or to be called Manhattan's Left Bank in The Economist.

"There's an inexorable drift toward Brooklyn," said Elyse Cheney, a literary agent who, for now, is based in SoHo. "That's where writers are and where so many publishers live. And as the profits of the business may change through the advent of e-books, the profit margins in this industry are becoming narrower, so I would imagine that it makes both financial and artistic sense to move there."

It's been awhile since I've done a book review for Scott's Annual Book Challenge, but that's because I took a break from reading for awhile. The other day I had the pleasure of reading this book by Christopher Moore and was pleasantly surprised to finish it in one sitting.

The main character, Jody, is attacked on her way home from work and bitten by a vampire, who has her drink his blood, thus also becoming a vampire. He leaves her with her arm exposed to the sun and a large sum of money. Jody awakes in a dumpster two days later, slowly realizing what fate the vampire had in store for her. She quits her job and spends her days sleeping and her nights patrolling the streets of San Francisco.

Jody realizes she is going to need someone to help her during the day, so she selects Tommy Flood, a shift manager at the local Safeway who works graveyard shifts. Tommy is naive and inexperienced with women, so he quickly succumbs to the charms of beautiful Jody and they move in together. Tommy guards Jody during the day and lets her drink his blood when she needs it.

However, someone is stalking San Francisco's down and out and leaving the bodies in close proximity to Jody's whereabouts, and it isn't Jody. Police eventually receive a description of Jody and property belonging to Tommy at several crime scenes. Also, the original vampire who attacked Jody keeps showing up and taunting Jody with what he knows about being a vampire that she does not.

The entire tale is entirely believable though it deals with unbelievable subject matter. This is the second in a series of books about Jody and Tommy. I have not read the next one, "You Suck", but that is soon to change. The series concludes with "Bite Me", which I have already reviewed. This is some of Christopher Moore's finest work. I completely enjoyed reading this and fell in love with the characters.

Sei Shonagon was born sometime in 965 and she was a Lady in Waiting to the Empress Sadako. There are few female writers from this time period anywhere and it was interesting to find this book which was translated and edited by Ivan Morris. It was published by Columbia University Press in 1991. I found this book in a University book store in Pittsburgh Pa.

This pillow book is filled with everyday experiences, poems and many insights into the workings of the Imperial Palace of late 10th century Japan.

A pillow book was really just a notebook of things men and woman wrote after retiring to their room at night. This book is full of anecdotes, personal impressions and daily notes that really bring the reader closer to the life of upper-class life in the classic age called the Heian period.

There are poems, stories and thoughts from Shonagon that really make one see a life that many never knew or could imagine. She describes dress and costume, little stories of persons who were major and minor players in the Court. She is not without some negative aspects, her views of the lower-class are probably the way many upper-class people saw those beneath their station in life. And even this creates a knowledge for the reader that may not be prevelent in other writing of the period.

This was a very interesting book to read and it is set up in small chapters that can be picked up and read from begining to end or just picked up and opened to any page and read. I will leave you with a little of her writing and a poem.

24. "It Is So Stifling Hot", page 60- "It is so stifling hot in the Seventh Month that even at night one keeps all the doors and lattices open. At such times it is delightful to wake up when the moon is shining and to look outside. I enjoy it even when there is no moon. But to wake up at dawn and see a pale sliver of a moon in the sky-well, I need hardly say how perfect that is."

85. "On The Sixth of the Month, page 149

"Pluck them or pinch them as you may,

Indifferent they may remain,

These earless plants who hear not what I say,

Yet, since there are so many blossoms here,

surely some chrysanthemums must hear."

Any one intersted in Japanese culture of the ealy period of Japanese history would enjoy this book. With a lack of female writers of this time she provides us with a look in side the mind of a woman during that peroid also. We have very few places and books to find these insights, history and knowledge of earlier times. A very good book and easy to read.

New books from the children of Vonnegut and Sexton, political books by Bush, Woodward and Palin, an "inside the Tea Party" book and another about the debates on the Constitution. New books by Philip Roth and Armistead Maupin.

All-in-all, I can't wait for the first fire in the wood stove this fall. Here's a quick view of these and some of the other books coming soon.

"Conservatives haven't reacted well to the book. Actually, they haven't reacted well to the title of the book, because none of them have read it. (Not that they've ever let ignorance get in the way of declaring something evil before.)" - Markos Moulitsas