Metherell Towers, Britain’s oldest nudist camp, has been put up for sale. The nine-bedroom chateau was opened up by Edward Hemingway, cousin of Ernest, back in the 1930s. The inside dirt is that Hemingway wrote nude standing up, with the typewriter roughly at waist level. And certainly granddaughters Marguax and Mariel have had difficulty keeping their clothes on in the films that they appeared in. Is there some nudist streak within the Hemingway genotype? I leave the fine investigative team at the Literary Dick to sort this out.

The Vancouver Courier is unimpressed with Don DeLillo’s 1999 play Valparaiso, pointing out “it doesn’t make for fully satisfying theatre. At the heart of DeLillo’s play, there’s a sad, sad story and the impact could have been overwhelming. But that’s not where DeLillo wants to go and so Valparaiso doesn’t go there.”

Newsweek takes a look at The Escapist Unbound, suggesting that literary involvement with comics is the key to mainstream acceptance.

James Sallis is crazy about Walter Tevis, a native San Franciscan, pointing out that by Tevis’s own admission, The Man Who Fell to Earth is “a very disguised autobiography.” The now famous book had been rejected multiple times by publishers, despite Tevis’s remarkable success with The Hustler. Here’s an audio interview with Tevis from 1983 just before his death. And last August, Bookslut’s Michael Schaub took a look at The Queen’s Gambit. And back in 1999, both The Hustler and The Man Who Fell to Earth were named by Jonathan Lethem as two examples of great novels overshadowed by their film adaptations

Angry Asian Man, among many others, is interviewed about the sexual identity of the Asian male by the L.A. Times .