• Jonathan Franzen, embarrassed to be publishing a memoir, does it anyway. (Via Conversational Reading, where the results of that study about men’s and women’s reading preferences are cited with approval. Evidently I should have been born a hermaphrodite.)

• Excerpts from washing machine manuals receive the same polite rejections as novel manuscripts. (Via Bookninja.)

• Although Turkey halted its criminal prosecution of Orhan Pamuk for “insulting Turkishness,” several writers have brought a civil suit seeking damages — for what?, as the Literary Saloon says — against the author.

• The Angolan novelist Sousa Jamba has started a blog about political corruption in Africa.

• Congratulations to Laila Lalami, who’s won a Fulbright Fellowship to work in Morocco next year.

• He is risen! To the top of the NYT bestseller list.

• Filming has begun on the Jane Austen biopic.

• Installments of Robert Frenay’s new book are delivered every day by RSS or email.

• In a generally negative review of A.M. Homes’ This Book Will Save Your Live, Lev Grossman writes: “It’s carefully, maybe even elegantly constructed, and it trots along at a highly readable pace (good people at Viking, I would prefer it if you didn’t quote that last sentence in an ad).”