Elmore Leonard is writing his next novel for teens. His new book, A Coyote’s in the House, assumes “a coyote-eat-cat reality.” Leonard decided upon this formula after concluding that Madonna’s “cat-eat-coyote fantasy,” Jay Leno’s “cat-eat-dog quasi-reality” and Billy Crystal’s “ants-eat-anteater delusion” weren’t premises that could sustain the attention spans of young readers.

Biographer William Manchester, who recently handed over the reins to Paul Reid to finish the third book of The Last Lion, his highly lauded Winston Churchill series, has passed away at 82.

826 Valencia has published Waiting to Be Heard, which features several stories by teenagers who took the classes. As the Chronicle reports, one of the young writers, 18 year old Courtney King, grew up in the Bayview-Hunters Point area. The book was funded by the Isabel Allende Foundation. Dave Eggers has claimed that the 826 Valencia students offered “professional editing” when assembling the book.

The British have announced that they no longer feel inferior to U.S. novelists. The sudden burst in UK hubris, however, had much to do with noted American novelist John Updike singling out UK minority writers — an option, according to the Guardian, apparently outside the purview of the typical Brit reader or the average Fleet Street hack.

Rasputin: “Moveon.org, I love you, but seriously, what is this shit? You’re handing out fliers, trying to get people to go see The Day After Tomorrow? Maybe you should reconsider?”