We love the image of these young people laboriously but lovingly writing their personal diaries as a way to preserve culture: …more

You’re probably familiar with the work of cartoonist Ted Rall, whose work appears on Salon and in many other places. He is raising money for a trip to Afghanistan to report, in his way, on the situation there, and through a website, you can support the trip with small donations.

I really like the micro-granting site Kickstarter, and I’ve supported several projects with ten or twenty dollars here and there. One of the cool things about it is that if a project fails to reach its fund-raising goal, no one’s donation goes through, so projects require a sort of consensus of support.

A woman who claimed a novelist and former friend based the character of a sexually promiscuous alcoholic on her has won a $100,000 libel award from a Georgia jury.

Vicki Stewart claimed that Haywood Smith, a former childhood friend, used her as the basis for a character in her novel The Red Hat Club.

During the trial, Stewart’s lawyer brandished a piece of paper with the word SLUT written in large letters, saying, “This is what [Smith] did to the fabric of Vicki Stewart’s life… She made her into a slut, an atheist and an alcoholic. Ms. Smith’s irresponsible words have stained the fabric of Vicki Stewart’s life. These stains will never come out.”

Smith has indicated she will not appeal the verdict, saying “I hope this [verdict] is healing for Ms. Stewart.”

From a recent blog entry by author Cathleen Schine: …more

Fiction writer Michelle Wittle got so tired of going over her short story that she just sent the damn thing out, assuming it had no typos. Oops.

Of course, this is why you have friends read your stuff just to look for typos that make you look like a lamebrain. But even several pairs of eyes can miss a painfully awful flub. …more

British writer Simon Van Booy has won “the world’s richest short story prize”, the Frank O’Connor award, for his collection Love Begins in Winter.

Van Booy, who lives in New York and is also the author of The Secret Lives of People in Love, receives €35,000.

This is the fifth time the Frank O’Connor prize — named for the Irish author — has been awarded. Previous winners include Yiyun Li, Haruki Murakami, and Jhumpa Lahiri.

While browsing the web during a slow pre-holiday weekend day at work, I stumbled across a font family called Vialog, which is intended to be used primarily in signage. One of the fonts in the family, Vialog Signs Conduct, contains some of the most sinister glyphs I’ve ever seen. You could practically storyboard a thriller, or at least a comic strip, by rearranging them. Like this: …more

This account of a New York colloquium designed to highlight Jack Kerouac’s Québéqois roots has an odd turn at the end, in which the reporter calls attention to the fact that the confab was part of a series on Latino writers. “The boundaries are blurring,” said the series’ curator.

In a post on The Guardian (UK), books writer Alison Flood writes about the “Choose Your Own Adventure” series of books and how she would skip ahead to find out whether a prospective choice “led to the treasure in the cave or a horrible death, escape from the dungeon or a watery doom.”

She calls this cheating, but defends the practice. After all, it is called “Choose Your Own Adventure,” not “Make a Choice and Suffer the Consequences.” …more

In the New York Times today, filmmaker and author Guillermo del Toro and coauthor Chuck Hogan –they have a novel coming out called The Strain — write about how vampires first made it into popular culture early in the 19th century when a group of English writers summered at a villa on Lake Geneva. Mary Godwin, soon to become Mary Shelley, invented Frankenstein’s monster, and a doctor named John William Polidori created a tale called “The Vampyre” from various folk legends. (Bram Stoker’s more familiar novel was written over 75 years later.)

Del Toro and Hogan’s essay suggests the appeal of the vampire myth rests on the “blood alchemy” accomplished when a vampire bites, as human life is exchanged for a more sinister one: “For as his contagion bestows its nocturnal gift, the vampire transforms our vile, mortal selves into the gold of eternal youth, and instills in us something that every social construct seeks to quash: primal lust. If youth is desire married with unending possibility, then vampire lust creates within us a delicious void, one we long to fulfill.”

Perhaps that has something to do with the weird “swine flu parties” that cropped up in the UK this summer. Social fun combined with deadly risk — what could be sexier?

Rumors of a new device supposedly being prepared by Apple for a release sometime in the next five months are flying this morning after an FT.com story which describes about a flat, rectangular device with which users would interact by way of a touch screen. The gizmo is said by various writers to be a competitor to the Amazon Kindle, a giant iPod, or a mashup of the two. It is also being described as a colour, flat-panel TV, a train wreck of a design, and a non-starter in the education market without built-in content.

By comparing the articles, it’s possible to come up with a consensus: The Apple Tablet (assuming such a thing actually exists) will have a touch-screen interface only; you could type on a keyboard that takes up a large part of the screen, leaving only a narrow strip for composition that reminds one of early word-processors — or it might have a stand and an optional external keyboard as shown here. It will have Internet connectivity or phone connectivity, or both. It will play movies and music, and you’ll be able to read books on it.

Apple itself, famously secretive about its upcoming products until they are revealed at a flashy trade show, is saying nothing.

William T. Vollmann, the author whose exhaustive research helps to blur the line between fiction and nonfiction, and whose books tend to be measured by the pound, has a new book coming out titled Imperial. The 1300-page tome looks at the arid California-Mexico border, and its culture and people, from many angles.

The New York Times tours the border zone with the author and offers snapshots of the fence, the people who live on both sides, the horrendously polluted New River, and an American graveyard where the bodies of people who have died crossing the border are buried.

The piece, which includes links to an excerpt and a slide show of locations, doesn’t even make clear whether the book is a novel or not; somehow, that’s fitting. It is actually non-fiction.

New York magazine has a piece on the book, along with a link to an interview with Vollmann’s editor, Paul Slovak.

In a post on the blog Book Publishing News, publicist Scott Lorenz distills a recent speech by New York Times Book Review Editor Barry Gewen and accounts from other sources to form a picture of how the NYTBR — probably the most influential and widely-read book review in the country — actually chooses which books to review. Basically: …more

In the Guardian, novelist Ewan Morrison — whose newest novel is called Ménage — tosses out a list of literary ménages à trois, leading off with the Hemingway erotic novel (some would call it an embarrassment that Hemingway never intended to publish) The Garden of Eden.

One of the most notable scenes left off Morrison’s list is the three-way between the fictionalized Henry Miller, his wife “Maude,” and a friend of hers named Elsie, in Sexus. For the curious, here’s how the scene starts — NSFW.

Readers, what other memorable threesomes can you recall?

Beacon Press has come to an agreement with the heirs of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to republish four out-of-print books by the clergyman and civil rights leader, including “Strength to Love,” a collection of his most eloquent and inspiring essays tying the message of Jesus to the struggle for civil rights, as in the essay “Loving Your Enemies,” where King says:

“Far from being the pious injunction of a Utopian dreamer, the command to love one’s enemies is an absolute necessity for survival.”

Kaye Gibbons, author of the 1987 debut best-seller Ellen Foster and several subsequent novels, is the subject of an Associated Press profile published in several newspapers and Sunday book sections over the weekend. The article traces her downfall from “vivacious” best-selling author to her 2008 arrest for forging hydrocodone prescriptions to her disappearance into mental illness. …more

In the 1960s and 70s, Central and South America were rife with dictatorships which used secret police, the military, right-wing death squads and tight control of the media to quash dissent and keep power. One of the most egregious of these police states was Argentina, still recovering from its anti-democratic Peronist era. In that nation, the right-wing government was explicitly anti-Communist and anti-Semetic. Thousands of people disappeared, thousands more were exiled, thousands more imprisoned and tortured.

If you’re under 40, you may not have much awareness of this history, unless you’ve seen the 1985 film Kiss of the Spider Woman (from the 1976 novel by Manuel Puig) or read the seminal account Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number by Jacobo Timerman. …more

An interview on New American Media with writer Richard Rodriguez has a fascinating take on what’s happening to American newspapers. Using the famously provincial San Francisco Chronicle as an example, Rodriguez says,  ”I don’t think the Chronicle is dying so much as I think that San Francisco is dying.” …more

Trevor Paglen may be familiar for his 2008 appearance on The Colbert Report, where he talked about his book I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to be Destroyed By Me, a picture book of military unit patches worn by servicemen in secret flight squadrons and other classified projects. …more

President Barack Obama signed legislation on Monday naming the Great Falls on the Passaic River in Paterson, N.J. a national historic park.

The 77-foot falls, site of early American industrial plants, has also inspired American writers. The great 20th century poets William Carlos Williams, whose epic work “Paterson” used the falls and the river as embodiments of American spirit, and Allen Ginsberg, who also commemorated the falls in his work, grew up nearby. Novelist John Updike partially set his late novel, In the Beauty of the Lillies, at the falls. The bridge over the falls even served as the site of a mob killing in “The Sopranos.”

A news video by the Newark Star-Ledger showing the falls and environs.

The Words without Borders blog has a fascinating post on two novellas by Jack Kerouac in his native French, works that were written in the early 1950s and which reflect his interest in Proust, Balzac and the French literary tradition. News of Kerouac’s French works came in a panel at the Americas Society in New York, featuring Québec journalist Gabriel Anctil. …more

Publishers Marketplace reports that Harpers has agreed to publish “The Sea is My Brother,” a “lost” novel by Jack Kerouac, written in 1942 and based on his experiences in the Merchant Marine. According to the book “Desolate Angel” by Dennis McNally, Kerouac wrote the work while on the SS Dorchester, where he served in the galley.

The biography Jack Kerouac by Michael Dittman, which describes Kerouac’s somewhat rocky service in the merchant fleet, quotes Kerouac as describing The Sea is My Brother as being about “man’s simple revolt from society as it is, with the inequalities, frustration, and self-inflicted agonies. Wesley Martin loved the sea with a strange, lonely love; the sea is his brother and sentences. He goes down. The story also of another man, in contrast, who escapes society for the sea, but finds the sea a place of terrible loneliness.” If it sounds familiar to fans of Kerouac, Atop an Underwood, the 1999 compendium of Kerouac’s early and unpublished writings contained “a substantial chunk of the third version of The Sea is My Brother,” according to the Kerouac fansite Jack Magazine.

The news, and the photo of Kerouac wearing a naval cap, made me think of other sea-going novelists. …more

A recent entry on the publishing blog Galleycat told of the writer Molly Jong-Fast and how she was quitting writing to become an agent. Jong-Fast’s somewhat privileged complaints — she is the daughter of Erica Jong and the novelist Jonathan Fast, and signed her three-book contract at age 20 — put me in mind of a couple of other public laments by writers. …more