• Harper Lee made a rare public appearance yesterday to accept an award from the Los Angeles public library.

• Before serving on the jury at Cannes, Toni Morrison announced, “My judgment is infallible. I bring you my enthusiasm and my infallibility.” Later she heralded the impassioned debate that characterized the voting process.

• Jonathan Safran Foer tells the Observer that he believes all fiction, even if set in “Japan in 1400BC,” is autobiographical, and reveals the emotional impetus behind Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (which I threw aside with great force after 50 pages). The UK Times, meanwhile, characterizes Foer’s latest novel as “a mistake,” with an “overall effect … of more-bangs-for-bucks trickery.”

• Tom Shone argues that the “curious weakness of [Chuck] Palahniuk’s neo-brutalist aesthetic is how hermetically sealed it must remain from anything that might challenge it” (i.e., Anita Brookner).

• “After making a heartfelt plea for the return of his ‘lost’ pictures,” Scottish novelist and artist Alasdair Gray “has tracked down one of his best-loved works, The Sixth Day Of Creation, just round the corner from his house.”