Glenn Beck rules the writing world

Apparently Glenn Beck's new novel is out (and to think, I wasn't tracking this closely!). And what are the people saying?

...Apparently, most people aren't saying anything. Don't worry though, he'll sell a shit ton anyway.

Cute Penguin covers that don't technically exist

Amy Fleisher designed the absolute cutest classic Penguin covers that Penguin never designed. As a sucker for newly covered classics, I heart these.

Seriously, what happens at BEA?

BEA is a mystery. What really happens there? Answer: human sacrifice. Spooky!

Breaking up is hard to do

Especially when you have to break up with a book. This article is great, for the ways it breaks down types of books to dump.

Orlando Bloom is not a musketeer

Orlando Bloom, continuing his domination of books-to-movies, will be the Duke of Buckingham in a new adaptation of The Three Musketeers. You heard that right, gentlefolk, they're going to put Orlando Bloom next to Christoph Waltz, and hope that no one notices that one of the people with an accent is actually a block of wood.

Hurray casting!

On the importances of titles

Oh, Elizabeth Eslami, I really feel for you, in your article about people assuming your book is erotica. A slightly misleading title is making you have to defend your characters' reputations and repeatedly state that they are not incestuous.

But no one saw this coming with the title Bone Worship?

The mistress memoirs and the path to a book deal

It turns out, having writing talent doesn't land you a book deal. In reality, all you have to do is fuck a celebrity (not even an A list one!).

So, aspiring authors, take heart: don't worry about rejections, because boning, and not talent, is the way to success.

Things I want for my birthday

I seriously want this cake:

A guide to editorial positions

Associate editor, editor, managing editor, editor-in-chief--what do all of these things mean? Well, check out this guide. A sample:

Assistant Editor – this person is not even an editor, just some uncreative person with an English degree who’s in charge of adding or removing commas. They also have to replace curly quotes with straight quotes, and remembering where all the italics were when somebody loses the HTML. This person wears glasses, and was not loved as a child.

Don't say I never solved anything for you.

Knowledge of volcanoes trumps that of zombies

Hello, American friends stuck in Europe and European friends stuck everywhere but Europe. Are you mad about this whole Iceland/volcano thing? If so, I hope you are only mad at yourself, for not being properly prepared for the temporary volcano apocalypse in the same manner that I'm sure all of you are ready for the zombie apocalypse and Y2K part 2 (The Reckoning).

For those of you who are sure you would be ready for volcanobliteration, take this quiz of volcano knowledge (um, about volcanoes in literature) and see how you stand. Stand ye strong?

I took this quiz and got 5 out of 10, and the admonition, "Don't blow your top, but nothing much erupted there." So maybe someone else should be in charge of our survival from volcanoes. Volunteers?

Ground black pepper is decidedly not "ground black people"

A misprint in an Australian cookbook (in which "people" was substituted for "pepper" of the "ground black" variety) cost $20k to fix. Now, this super sucks, and is one of the worse possible typos. The publisher's response?

"When it comes to the proofreader, of course they should have picked it up, but proofreading a cook-book is an extremely difficult task. I find that quite forgivable."

Of course it's forgivable! It's not like you pay proofreaders to keep you from having to recall for misprints.

George Washington: Thieving scalawag

George Washington forgot to return 2 library books in 1789, and now owes $300,000 in library dues. Shame on you, father of our nation. Returning library books is a civic duty, sir.

Librarians won't tell you what to do...

They'll just send you really passive-aggressive notices.

Amazing. Click click, sirs.

The First Brother-in-Law spills

And boy, does he have some nice, enthusiastic, and encouraging things to say. Note to Craig Robinson: you're doing tell-all wrong.

Robinson, brother of the First Lady, has a memoir coming out, in which he wrote about his parents meeting not-yet-President Obama. Verdict? "'Too bad,' Marian said. 'Yep,' Fraser answered. 'She'll eat him alive.'"

This is, of course, the prequel to Robinson's novel about zombie Michelle Obama, in which she literally eats Pres-bama alive.

Dogs and fonts

To the font lovers of the world: doggy typefaces!

The Country Bunny is the best books ever

At the New Yorker Book Bench, Kelly Bare writes about introducing her son to books she read as a child, including The Country Bunny.

I looooved this book as a kid (hey, Jews love Easter too...for candy and bunnies...). Some fun facts about the secret civil rights and feminist undertones:

“The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes” was published in 1939 by Du Bose Heyward, who is most famous for “Porgy and Bess” (he wrote the novel “Porgy,” co-wrote the play of the same name with his wife, Dorothy Heyward, and wrote the libretto and some of the lyrics for Gershwin’s opera). It’s illustrated by Marjorie Flack, whom you probably know (if you know her) from “The Story About Ping,” and it is the kid-lit total package. Lyrical writing, glowing illustrations, fuel for the imagination, a sense of humor, and, of course, a message: plucky little girl bunnies who defy prejudice and believe in themselves can grow up to become fully actualized lady bunnies who raise smart, happy, kind children and do fulfilling work outside the warren.

Having an excuse to purchase this book is on my list of reasons to have children. Also on the list is making it less weird to go see children's movies, and having a small tribe to begin building my army.

Bunnies are where it's at

Aww!

Yes, it's a Friday. What tipped you off?

Rags to riches is much better than rags to rags

We all love Susan Boyle (or we did the first time we heard her, at any rate) because she was so unexpected, and it was nice to root for someone for once, instead of tearing someone down. This is the underlying theory behind Tatjana Soli's formula for writers to like as people, and honestly, I think it's a pretty solid formula, because it's hard to root for the Lauren Conrad-as-author types of the world.

So here's a "hurrah" for all of you currently humble, quirky job havers, who will one day shoot to immortality (and hopefully not for falling down in a YouTube video). As for me, my story will track my meteoric rise to fame from humble waffle and burrito connoisseur to...er...arrogant waffle and burrito connoisseur. Bask in my humble glory while you can!

Hamlet (from the mouth of babes)

Brian Cox teaches a 2 and a half year old Halmet's soliloquy. And you know what? He is a baller.

It's like Hamlet-let! As in, you know, Hamlet, and the "let" from piglets...no? Whatever, it's adorable.

Salinger fan mail: Not always fun mail

Joanna Smith Rakoff wrote an article that made me sad, about answering fan mail for J.D. Salinger. She says:

The letters came from Sri Lanka or the Netherlands or Arizona. They included deeply personal admissions—cancer diagnoses, bankruptcy, divorce—and were often written in Salinger's own brash style or, at the very least, incorporated the slang of the period he chronicled....For the most part, they knew that Salinger didn't read his fan mail—in fact, he'd insisted that nothing, not one letter, be passed on to him—but each was convinced that his letter was going to be the one that was so moving, so brilliant, so funny, so perfectly aligned with Salinger's interests and sensibilities, that we, at Ober, would pass it on to him.

...These were not letters that the writers had tossed off carelessly, but notes that had clearly been written and rewritten, until just the right tone was struck. How could I simply throw them away? I began sending them personal letters telling them how much we appreciated hearing their stories and explaining, more gently, that we were prohibited from sending Salinger his mail, but we so often wished that we could.

Back in the day I used to answer a subset of religious and spiritual slush, which was heavily populated by car crash victims and lonely little old ladies, and so I recognize the urge to write really, really, really nice "sorry and no thank you" letters. (A few times writers sent me long handwritten thank you notes in response to my rejections, which actually almost made me cry at work once.)

As much as people in the industry give shit to the slush pile (and I give a ton of shit to the slush pile), and as hardened to illiteracy and jerk-ness as everyone gets, there are still some letters that crack you open like a tiny crustacean.