• Philip Roth has won this year’s PEN/Nabokov award. In the TLS, Bejamin Markovits calls his latest novel, “Roth’s attempt to modernize The Death of Ivan Ilych.” (Via Light Reading.)

• Sacred doily discovers similarities between Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero and Joan Didion’s marvelous Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and a commenter recalls that the Didion-Ellis parallels led to “dustup” following Less Than Zero‘s publication that “even made it into an episode of ‘Law & Order: SVU’.” (Via Bookslut; Ellis has acknowledged the influence.)

• In an interview for Boldtype, George Saunders tells Toby Warner that reading The Bluest Eye for the first time at 35: “literally did something to my brain chemistry that has made my life afterward better.” He also talks about transforming fiction into a screenplay.

• Valerie Plame, whose identity as a covert CIA operative was blown three years ago thanks to the White House, has a book to sell.

• Karla Starr, on meeting Benjamin Kunkel (Indecision): “If this is all it takes to succeed in the world of letters, then I am horribly, horribly screwed.”

• From a collection of Chaucerian pick-up lines: “Nyce bootes. Wanna swyve?” (Via Making Light.)