- Robert Calasso’s “approach of disclaiming a sustained argument and offering, instead, a galaxy of essaylets” in a new study of Kafka “is either modest or frustrating, according to taste.”
- In this week’s bookish news of the weird, Dutch libraries are “lending out people,” including junkies, lower-income people, lesbians, and other volunteers “from outside of the Dutch mainstream … who will go sit in a cafeteria with library patrons, have a cup of coffee and chat with them.” (Did you hear about the British zoo with humans in it? That was cool. Can you imagine what the “intelligent design” people would say if you tried that here, though?)
- The Paris Review masthead lists two new poetry editors, Meghan O’Rourke and Charles Simic.
- “Once upon a time, I wanted to be Bret Easton Ellis. I guess I was the last to realize this (I thought I wanted to be F. Scott Fitzgerald, but more on that later) — friends and fellow writers all knew this about me long before I did, but were kind enough not to point it out,” writer Jaime Clarke admits. And now he’s launched a Bret Easton Ellis-oriented blog, BEE & Me (with apologies to Nicholson Baker). Update: Number One Hit Song responds.
- Adaptations: An adaptation of Rupert Thomson’s The Book of Revelation is in the works. Jean Nathan’s The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll: The Search for Dare Wright was optioned earlier this summer. Scott Rudin bought the rights to Benjamin Kunkel’s Indecision. Robert Zemeckis is still directing the screen version of Franzen’s The Corrections.