* The only drag about starting up a book tour now is missing the wonderful PEN World Voices festival in New York. Fortunately, MetaxuCafe is rounding up the reports.
* NPR speaks to Dmitri Nabokov about The Original of Laura.
* Good things happening to nice people: Ron Currie, Jr. wins the Young Lions Award.
The end of the evening brought us back to the reason for being there. Ron Currie, Jr., won for his novel God is Dead, and he hugged his mom for a really long time before accepting the check. It’s his first novel, and with glitterati bearing witness, it might just change his life.
* Another Michiko Kakutani: Ogre piece, this time in the Guardian, occasioned by a Harvard Crimson report of Jonathan Franzen's appearance in James Wood's class, in which Franzen remarked that "the stupidest person in New York City is currently the lead reviewer of fiction for the New York Times". (Thanks to David Clarke.)
* Mark Doty, who just stood upon the stage of the Los Angeles Times Book Awards, is profiled with his partner Paul Lisicky in the Ithaca Times.
Doty, in fact, has almost finished a new book, which will come out in a series with Graywolf Press devoted to The Art of.... Doty's assignment was the 'art of description,' a task he savored, though he did so with caution. "I'm particularly talking about poetry, which represents the visual world, the sensual world, in this project. And, it turns out, of course, that when you're talking about description, you're talking about everything: you're talking about how perception is rendered in language, and why. One must ask: Why do we want to do that? Why is it satisfying? In any case, I'm almost finished with it," he adds.
* The new issue of Boldtype is now online and awaits your attention.
* Michel Houellebecq is publicly served up a helping of Mere's Merde.
"My son can go and get screwed by whomever he wants, he can write another book, I don't give a toss," she says in one excerpt, widely published in French media on Wednesday.
"But if he has the misfortune of sticking my name on anything again he'll get my walking stick in his face and that'll knock his teeth out," she says in what newspapers described as a typical sample.
* Norman Mailer is remembered at Central Connecticut State University.
* Charles Simic is set to make his final appearance as Poet Laureate on May 8.
* An early look at the guest list of this year's Hay-on-Wye festival.
* The OUP Blog would like your thoughts on "What constitutes literary importance?"
* And, finally, our brilliant advice to Arundhati Roy, who "says she is not comfortable with the activist tag and wants to be identified as a writer only," is, well in that case, why don't you, oh, maybe write another novel?
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