• The home where Dickens completed Bleak House has been partially damaged in a fire.
• Marion Meade takes on Dorothy Parker. (via Chekhov’s Mistress)
• Don DeLillo’s new play Loves-Lies-Bleeding gets some coverage. Is it okay if I crack a few Henry James jokes? (via Sheila Heti’s #1 Fan)
• Over at I Love Books, folks are ranking Ulysses‘ chapters by their comprehensibility.
• Jim Crace digests Francis Fukuyama. (via Jenny D)
• Laila points to Haze, the latest Campo Santo production. We’d go, but not only are we profoundly exhausted, but there’s this horrible tax thing we’ve got to take care of this week.
• Holy shit! Lizzie Skurnick hasn’t disappeared from the face of the earth!
• Profile of Sengealese novelist Aminata Sow Fall.
• Sheila O’Flanagan: “I enjoyed the suits and briefcases and high heels. Then I got this urge to write.”
• Caitlin Flanagan, perhaps the only woman boosting Eisenhower-era values in the 21st century and a writer mistakenly identified as “intellectual” by the likes of the Atlantic and the New Yorker, blogged at Powell’s last week: “We laugh at the conformity that led to the ‘squareness’ of the Fifties, but we often forget to honor that decade’s emphasis on character, conscience, and civic responsibility that led to some of the great social achievements that followed, including civil rights and the women’s movement.” In fact, it was this emphasis on “Occupation: Housewife,” a woman’s second-tier status to a man (conscience!) and the “civic responsibility” of doing nothing more than cooking and cleaning that led women to call bullshit on the idea that they were somehow lesser than men. That anyone could “honor” this, without citing a single reason why, much less restrain laughter at celebrating such antediluvian values in the 21st century, is perhaps a vital clue that Ms. Flanagan is out to lunch, out of touch, and wholly unqualified to write for any media outlet.

To my profound surprise, attrition has (sorta) kicked in. Corpus currently revolts, mind counters. But in the meantime:

• Beverly Cleary on NPR. (via Rarely Likable)
• Is Dale Peck the worst Tournament of Books judge of his generation?
• Ben Yagoda on Michiko Kakutani: “The qualities most glaringly missing from Kakutani’s work are humor and wit. Maybe in an attempt to compensate, she writes one or two parody reviews a year….Talk about cringe-making. They are so awful, from start to finish, that you cannot avert your eyes, much as you would like to.” Indeed. A thinker without a sense of humor is like a soldier without a bayonet. He may as well hole himself up at the barracks.
• Dan Wickett tackles the issue of review dates vs. publish dates, and the Literary Saloon follows up.
• Yann Martel: “‘Everyone, at one point, has to start integrating the Holocaust into their lives.” This Holocaust: Can you find it at Crate & Barrel? And does it go well with the rococo prints and the setee?
• Abigail Nussbaum takes on the Hugo novelette nominees, the short story nominees and the novella nominees.
• It looks like the odds we calculated were wrong. (Then again, we somehow figured that Mitchell was beneath the Conde Nasty highbores and that, as a result, they wouldn’t be covering him.) It looks like The New Yorker is the first to break ranks, remarking that Black Swan Green “has the subtlety of a watermark.” Although, Daniel Zalewski’s review also mistakenly suggests that Mitchell’s renown hasn’t translated into America. Really? Glowing reviews from nearly every media outlet? Considerable discussion among literary geeks? SRO crowds at bookstores? Maybe the Central Park West crowd might pooh-pooh Mitchell as “middlebrow.” I don’t know. But is this because Cloud Atlas has sold 100,000 copies in the States or because certain writers might be jealous of a young writer has come along with four novels transcending both popular and literary waters? By that measure, let’s discount John Updike, John Barth and Philip Roth from literary credibility. After all, their books sold pretty well during their early careers. They couldn’t possibly be any good, could they?
• B.R. Myers’ photo revealed. (Yes, sadly enough, we were curious.)
• WTF? James Blunt, ice cream and a 16 year old girl? Mike Tyson is a troubled soul. (via Quiddity)