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Also via MediaBistro, there is a BBC report that “Crime novelist Edward Bunker, who taught himself to write in prison and appeared in hit movie Reservoir Dogs, has died in California aged 71.” Bunker spent a total of 18 years in prison and ultimately published novels. He was Mr. Blue in Tarantino’s film. Read the [...]

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MediaBistro noted an interesting article The Christian Science Monitor about teen literary sensations and how hard it is for them to follow up with their second book. It’s an interesting article and you can read it here. I was going to make some snarky comment about whatever happened to that kid who wrote Twelve but [...]

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I had no idea. All these years, I thought Cool Hand Luke was just a fantastic movie from 1967. I had no idea that it’s actually true and that Strother Martin’s character, The Captain, was not a prison warden but actually a Creative Writing Department Chair. You too? Well, you had it wrong, just like [...]

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PublishersLunch reported a few interesting deals in the last couple of days.

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Those of you in the north-central Mississippi area might want to skip lunch today and build up a hefty appetite. The gang at Square Books is cooking up burgers today in conjunction with John T. Edge’s book signing for Hamburger & Fries: An American Story. Edge, a food expert who has appeared on The Food [...]

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CNN has a good profile of James Frey, author of A Million Little Pieces and, most recently, My Friend Leonard. I loved Frey’s first book and, as a side note, I thought it had one of the coolest covers in a long time. Haven’t read his new one yet, but I’m looking forward to it. [...]

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There’s nothing like talking to an old friend. Or maybe not a friend per se but someone who came from your same small town. Or someone who worked the same job you did. You reminisce about past experiences and you remind each other of the great things you’ve forgotten. Interviewing Cynthia Shearer was like sharing [...]

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eBay has an interesting battle going on between two sellers in Australia. One person, located in Rowville, Victoria, AU is offering a copy of the new Harry Potter printed upside-down, back-to-front. Asking price? $10,000 AU (which is approximately $7,492 American). The seller wonders if the boy wizard cast a spell on the book. But there’s [...]

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Fugitive filmmaker Roman Polanski has been allowed to testify via live video link in his libel case against Vanity Fair. Polanski is now 71 and lives in France, a fugitive from American justice, having fled the country after pleading guilty to the statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl in 1977. Vanity Fair is sold in [...]

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MediaBistro picked up an interesting article in The Chronicle of Higher Education that highlights the shocking disappearance of books from college libraries. Thomas H. Benton (a psuedonym of a professor at a Midwestern liberal arts college) writes “What does it mean when the University of Texas at Austin removes nearly all of the books from [...]

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The folks at Trident Media Group are definitely some of the more accessible, approachable, and generous agents that I’ve come across, so I was pleased to see that Melissa Flashman and Jenny Bent signed a great deal with Houghton Mifflin in a pre-empt recently. How to Be Useful: A Beginner’s Guide to the Meritocracy by [...]

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I came across a great line in Wayne Koestenbaum’s essay My 80’s: “The world was doing it’s best to ignore the fact that I was a writer.”

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