• Hemingway in Haryana: Amitava Kumar reflects on the selective abortion of female babies in India and recalls his first reading of Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.”

• NASCAR and Harlequin hop in bed together. (Let us not to the marriage of true minds, etc., etc.)

• “I couldn’t even get laid at Comic Con. Really think about that. I could not get laid at Comic Con.”

• Erotica keeps a literary publisher afloat.

• News that very nearly rivals Stallone’s Poe announcement: Marilyn Manson intends to play Lewis Carroll in a movie about the life of the Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland author.

• According to the A.P., Sara Gran’s Dope (championed by the proprietor of Book Angst) is roughly what you’d get if Raymond Chandler and Jim Thompson “return[ed] from the dead, [went] on a monthlong drinking binge and then hole[d] up in a boarding house to write a book together.” (Unfortunately, the reviewer trots out that old “first great noir novel from the mind of a woman” saw. Sarah Weinman and crime writer Laura Lippman respond.)

• Dysfunction Junction: Scott McLemee considers the state of Oprah Studies. (Previously: join Oprah’s book club, complete your general ed.)