- Rich, benevolent buyer sought for Granta. (My favorite Granta-related story: Rupert Thomson’s classic tale of writerly mortification, in which he recalls his brief, mistaken belief that the magazine named him one of Britain’s best young writers.)
- On reading the seventeen Booker-longlisted novels in one week.
- Disney books: assembled in Chinese sweatshops? (Via Boing Boing.)
- Multimedia: Tender is the Night adaptation to be shot next year; Everything is Illuminated trailers are out; the many new iterations of Don Quixote, discussed; composers are seduced by The Arabian Nights; the adaptation of Alicia Erian’s Towelhead is still in the works (look here and here for commentary when it appears); Talk of the Town: the musical lands open-ended run at the Algonquin Hotel, home of the $10,000 martini.
- V.S. Naipaul continues to pronounce the novel dead, and gets in a dig at Graham Greene.
- Shakespearean English: revived in Southwark, London? (See also a common Shakespeare misquote.)
- An Oxford University professor of psychiatry argues that writer Sebastian Faulks swiped and bastardized his radical theories about psychosis in his new novel.
- Ellen Gilchrist’s latest doesn’t look like her best work.
- Tingle Alley’s got your Hunter S. Thompson send-off links.
- Rushdie, profiled.