If only there were a heaven (he could see from hell)

Remainders

• Spilling the beans, the apple of my eye, salad days: Lisa Bramen investigates the origins of food idioms. (Via.)

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• I await my copy of Mark Twain's autobiography with slightly more excitement than trepidation (see also). Meanwhile, I like the related site This is Mark Twain.

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• Hilary Mantel's Telegraph essay on winning the 2009 Booker Prize is characteristically candid and insightful. (Via.)

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• Tom Stoppard, who's struggling with a new play, contemplates death. He'd prefer being killed by a falling bookcase to dying at the height of sexual passion. Did I ever link to this 2007 interview?

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• It's fascinating, given the way Muriel Spark so ruthlessly pared down her novels, that she chose to keep every scrap of paper for her archives. More ephemera: video of a 1971 interview, and Life's Spark photos.

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• Geoff Dyer contemplates Roland Barthes' Camera Obscura, on "photography against film." The second half of Barthes' book, written not long after his mother's death, focuses on a photo of her.

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• Alan Bennett has a new story, "The Greening of Mrs. Donaldson," in the LRB. I need to reread his uncommonly delightful The Uncommon Reader.

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• Selected letters of James Salter and his good friend Robert Phelps appear in the current issue of Narrative. Also, Pia Z. Ehrhardt reads some of her work.

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• "This old white motherfucker and his wife rolls up. He’s like, 'Young man, do you know where the Poe house is?'" The Wire and A.N. Devers on Edgar Allan Poe's Baltimore house.

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• The New York Society Library features an exhibition of Shirley Hazzard's (Transit of Venus) manuscripts, photographs, and more, through January 31.

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