Some guy named Ben Brown is guest-blogging at Bookslut this week. All we know is that Mr. Brown may or may not be Neal Pollack and that he has slept with everyone at 826 Valencia. He does, however, possess an important skill: the man can insert breaks between paragraphs. We wish Mr. Brown well on his temporary journey and we will be reading him with delight. We encourage you to send incriminating photos to benbrown@gmail.com.

Ron‘s located the ultimate creative matchup: Jack Kirby and The Prisoner.

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.