BBC: “In a BBC radio interview Rushdie said that he was ‘extremely shocked’ to hear the news that Grass had served with the Waffen-SS at the end of the second world war, but argued that the revelation made little difference to his literary reputation. It was ‘wrong’ to accuse Grass of ‘a huge act of hypocrisy’, he said, calling it ‘a partial concealment’.”

Fiction is dead. It dies and resurfaces, dies and resurfaces. It is Jason from Friday the 13th. It is an unwelcome call from your mother-in-law nagging you about bringing the quesadillas to the family picnic. It is that dentist who says, “This won’t hurt a bit,” when of course it hurts more than a bit.

Fiction! You bastard! Die fiction die! Why won’t you die? Why won’t you transform into a corporeal form like a piñata so that we can all beat you senseless and watch your innards spill onto the floor? Why can’t we wipe the lino clean with your blood? Why can’t we eat you for breakfast?

I want to ignore the fact that humanity thrives on stories for a moment and remind you that fiction is dead DEAD dead. If fiction will not die, then I will make it die. I am on a mission from God. If I catch you reading a novel, I will snatch it from your hands and tell you that you are wrong and that you too will die. And then I will beat you senseless and watch you die. I will laugh at you, foolish fiction reader, you who cannot acknowledge inevitability. I will use Astroglide and a cudgel, if necessary.

I will quote you troubling statistics about John Updike and ignore the 100,000 copies that Terrorist sold.

Fiction, I will bust your chops. Fiction, you are nothing. You emobdy entropy. And I will tell you again that you are dead, even when you pounce on my shoulders and perform an exuberant tap dance.

International Herald Tribune: “The British authorities removed a ban on carry-on luggage Monday, allowing airline passengers to carry a single, briefcase-sized bag on flights leaving British airports. Books, laptop computers and iPods can also be taken on board again. But airline officials said it remained unclear whether the new rules would ease the long delays at security checkpoints that have forced airlines to cancel some flights. The British transportation secretary, Douglas Alexander, warned at a news conference that “present difficulties at airports may continue for some time.”

The New Yorker: “Over the next seven years, Benjamin participated in drug sessions as either subject or observer at least nine times, but his attitude toward drugs remained vigilantly experimental. He seldom took them when he was alone, and he never had his own supplier, relying on doctor friends to procure hashish, opium, and, on one occasion, mescaline. The sessions were recorded in ‘protocols,’ furnishing raw material for what Benjamin intended to be a major book on the philosophical and psychological implications of drug use. When, in a letter to Gershom Scholem, his best friend from the age of twenty-three, Benjamin, then forty, listed four unwritten books that he considered ‘large-scale defeats’—evidence of the “ruin or catastrophe” that his career had become—the last was a ‘truly exceptional book about hashish.'”