• First off, a hearty congratulations to Mr. Sarvas, who just sold his book to Bloombury. Rest assured, in winter 2008, he shall not escape Bat Segundo.
• Oh no! Straight people are moving into the Castro! It’s the end of civilization as we know it!
• Pinky’s Paperhaus serves up a new podcast with Jami Attenberg.
• An AWP report, as filtered through one of Mr. Bryant’s friends.
• Tod Goldberg on jury duty.
• John Updike on Venetian candy. Amazingly, he didn’t find anything sexual about it. (via Freeman)
• You mean I’m not censored in China? Clearly, I’m not working hard enough. (via Mr. Tiffany)
• Are writer protagonists art or ego? (via Bookninja)
• Dylan Meets Seuss. Fantastic! (via Bookshelves of Doom)
• “Soap operas are too scared to include politics in their storylines.” You don’t say?
• It’s Freedom to Read Week in Canada. Because, as we all know, Canadians don’t read the other 51 weeks of the year.
• Kassia Kroszer has much to say about sexism, reading audiences and the bigger picture for book review weeklies.

CNN: “Today’s college students are more narcissistic and self-centered than their predecessors, according to a comprehensive new study by five psychologists who worry that the trend could be harmful to personal relationships and American society.”

Well, let’s examine this, shall we? I’m not sure if self-centered college kids are especially damaging to American society. After all, the minute they leave college, unless they’re sitting on a savings account, they’ll have to get jobs and the student loan collectors will be on their asses in about nine months demanding payment. Faced with these financial realities, egos have a tendency to plummet.

And here’s Professor Jean Twenge describing the culprit: “Current technology fuels the increase in narcissism. By its very name, MySpace encourages attention-seeking, as does YouTube.”

You know, by its very name, the United States of America proves to be a harmonious nation, devoid of racism, sexism, and classism. By its very name, American Idol encourages the worship of flags and apple pie among the populace. By its very name, an evaluation called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory permits a garden variety warehouse stocker to dissect personalities from the more noxious members of American society, stacking them with the overpriced doodads and baubles happily sold in a Target Greatland outlet. By her very name, Professor Jean Twenge makes my DNA (or my pants) feel inexplicable pangs of bullshit.

• Martin Amis: “I did have [a midlife crisis]. Sorry to inform you that you’re going to get one every decade after you’re forty, and it’s a different kind of crisis every time. You can read every novel ever written and they won’t prepare you for it. My midlife crisis was bang on schedule: mid-forties, divorce, terrible realizations about death.”
• Should authors respond to wrong-headed reviews? (via Maud)
• Podcasts, Haggis?
• The 2006 Nebula ballot. (via Gwenda)
• Jodi Picoult visits the school were her book was banned.
• Has Jonathan Littell scandalized France? My own statistics show that France is scandalized in some way every 32 minutes.
• Levi Asher talks with Danny Simmons.
• “Literary classics” now available on DVD.
• Rudy Wiebe has won the 2007 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction.
• Matthew Sharpe interviewed in Poets & Writers (via TEV)
• A new short story from Richard Russo at the Atlantic. Shockingly, it’s not behind a paywall. Has the Atlantic finally come to its senses? (via Dan Wickett)
• Teddy (via Other)
• Legos have changed.
• An honorary doc for Ozick. (via Orthofer)
• G.K. Chesterton gets the Golden Rule Jones Theater treatment.
• Mark Thwaite on Dawkins: “The God Delusion didn’t convince me at all, it just made me think Dawkins was a bit of a scary megalomaniac.”
• Scott Esposito: “Guess this is turning into ‘mean week’ here. Who will get dissed tomorrow?”