- Fiction: I’m obsessively checking The Boston Review site for the great James Hynes’ essay on the novels of the great Rupert Thomson. (Yes, this is a personal literary wet dream.) I have it on good authority that the piece will appear in the next issue, which, by my calculations, is March/April 2006. Meaning: it’ll be up tomorrow? Please?
- Poetry: For National Poetry Month, New Letters on the Air will present Four Decades of U.S. Poet Laureates, including Mark Strand and many others — but so far, no Louise Gluck. Pester your NPR affiliate to pick up the show. Also, Zadie Smith contributes a reading of Frank O’Hara’s “Animals” to the Verse by Voice project. Call 703-637-9276 to recite your own favorite poem. The Voice in the Attic: more on the recently-unearthed Philip Larkin tapes. And the Poetry Foundation is online. (Thanks, Tim.)
- Film: What would Truman Capote have made of Capote, the movie? Also, filming an unfilmable book. Jolie and Depp to star in a Wuthering Heights adaptation. And Richard Eyre on working with Judi Dench, whom he just directed in Notes on a Scandal.
- Stage: Ireland announces its Beckett centenary events today. And Rachel Campbell-Johnston wonders what Beckett would have made of the celebration. “I doubt he would have turned up,” she says. “‘All I want to do is sit on my ass and fart and think of Dante,’ he once told a concerned friend.”
- Sundry: Are we living in the last days of handwriting? The Telegraph on Stanbrook Abbey, the inspiration for Iris Murdoch’s The Bell. Gore Vidal sells his cliffside villa to a hotelier for big bucks. “The ‘Lost’ World of Flann O’Brien.” J.M. Coetzee will become an Australian citizen during writers’ week. Is the media one big ivy league reunion? TMFMTL’s unenthusiastic reaction to the naming of a new editor at The New Republic.