If keeping up with her publishing schedule isn’t bad enough, the Washington Post reports that Joyce Carol Oates’ theatrical adaptation of The Tattooed Girl will make its premiere at Washington’s Theater J. Oates will also be writing Van Helsing 2: They Needed Real Writers for Universal. Efforts were made to pry the pen away from Ms. Oates’ hand, but she remained stubbornly resistant and even penned a short story during the unsuccessful attempts to stop her from writing.

At the Seward Park Library, serving the Lower East Side of Manhattan for 95 years, annual reports have unearthed details about readers. The Times notes that in a 1920 report, sweatshop workers and tenement dwellers greadly desired Dickens and Hawthorne. During the Depression, “undesirables” scoured the stacks for books on syrup flavoring. And They Were Expendable and A Bell for Adano were popular just after World War II.

Wired: “The idea was to explore what happens when digital games are placed in the larger analog world of city streets. And, according to player Mike Olson, a player in Saturday’s Pac-Manhattan game, one of the things that happens is that, soon after the game starts, ‘the more dissolute graduate students begin throwing up.’ “

Guardian: “A video posted today on an Islamist militant website appeared to show a group affiliated with al-Qaida beheading an American contractor in Iraq, saying the death was revenge for the treatment of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers.”

Following up on Ernest Vincent Wright’s Gasby: A Story of Over 50,000 Words Without Using the Letter “E”, Michel Thaler has written a novel without verbs. Which begs the question: can a novel resembling the Incredible Hulk’s vernacular remain captivating for 250 pages?