A rare edition of Hamlet is set to go on sale at Christie’s. The edition is one of only 19 copies remaining from a 1611 printing (second edition ever), and may close at around $1 million.

Colm Tobin tried to write a series of essays on Henry James. But as he pored through the papers, he ended up writing a novel. I wonder if this is the kind of thing that Bob Coover had in mind.

So far, thanks to the blogosphere, I’ve read Ian Rankin thanks to a recommendation from Sarah, Kate Christensen thanks to a rec from Ron, and (soon) John Banville thanks to a rec from Mark. Now Rake gets into the game and tells us that Jack Butler’s Jujitsu for Christ is the shit. Okay. Sold!

I’m getting really tired of these Margaret Atwood profiles that paint Atwood as an overly serious and dowdy woman, rather than concentrating upon her writing talents. The headline here may as well have read: Margaret Atwood: Humorless Bitch or Not? Well, certainly her novels can be bleak, but it hasn’t occurred to Emma Brockes that she might be asking some really moronic questions. And I have to wonder if the Guardian would have been as nasty if, say, Martin Amis was as forthright as Atwood is in this article.

A number of folks have been asked what their favorite ten novels are over at Professor Barnhardt’s. If I had to pick my own choices, today, they’d be (in no particular order and subject to change in the next five minutes):

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth
The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Absalom! Absalom! by William Faulkner
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Recognitions by William Gaddis
Hunger by Knut Hamsun
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain