Last night, in my perusal of literary news, I stumbled across an article on The Guardian website, Is this a pint I see before me? The title, of course, is an allusion to one of the more famous lines from Macbeth (replace “pint” with “dagger”), and has to do with the fact that sometimes Shakespeare wrote some crap:

“Crap lines can be found in even the most revered places. When, for example, pondering whether to be or not to be, Hamlet fantasises about …

1. The trailer for Running With Scissors is up. Based on this evidence, the filmmakers opted for a “gentle” treatment of Augusten Burroughs’ sloppily humorous confessional, and also upped the role of Burroughs’ father so as to give Alec Baldwin something to do. The film seems to be aiming for a Royal Tanenbaums type of approach, which is a few degrees tamer and sweeter than the source material. We’ll have to see if audiences show up for this or not. …

When I was a kid on Long Island, we would always denote the fact that somebody was stupid, or had just said something stupid, by sticking a finger into a cheek and intoning “Doy”. Everybody in town had their own stamp on “Doy”: some would cross their eyes, twist their finger into their cheek and elongate the syllable until somebody told them to shut up, while others would give the word a Looney-Tunes-ish metallic boing, like “Doy-eey-eey-eey …” (repeat for several seconds).

I …

Ron Powers’ review of E. L. Doctorow’s new collection of literary essays, Creationists, in today’s New York Times Book Review is, in my opinion, a hilarious disaster. The pretentious article is riddled (and I do mean riddled) with sentences like this:

Reinforcing that approach — visible in Doctorow’s meticulously inductive construction, and in his affable indifference to polemic — is an even earlier influence, the Bronx High School of Science, which Doctorow attended in the 1940’s.

It reads like a parody of hallucinatory academic writing, …

People aren’t buying literary fiction, we are told. Male readers in particular aren’t buying it. The reasons given these days are sometimes based on what academics call “essentialist” explanations; in other words, these activities — or lack thereof — are the result of genes. Women, we are told in recent articles by Ian McEwan, Boris Johnson and others, are hard-wired to empathize and be interested in relationships. Men are more interested in practical issues and, that catch-all word, “facts”. Or, according to this …

The title of this post:

For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn

is a short story by Ernest Hemingway, perhaps written to settle a bar bet or perhaps written as a challenge, but either way, it’s a complete work of fiction. It’s a piece of writing I think about a lot, and it’s one of my favorites. It’s evocative, powerful and clocking in at six words, it proves that it’s not necessary to blather on endlessly to tell a good story.

The Hemingway story is …

1. I attended an outstanding group reading last night at the McNally Robinson bookstore in Soho. The theme was Israeli-Palestinian dialogue, and the event was sponsored by a group called Seeds of Peace. The event began with a bang when Leora Skolkin-Smith read a surprising personal document, a passionate love letter an anonymous Muslim teenager in Beirut had written to her Jerusalemite Jewish mother in the 1930’s. These readers were intent on breaking down the idea that Jews and Muslims …

This weekend’s Brooklyn Book Festival was a breath of fresh air for downtown BK, and I’m pretty sure everybody who showed up was impressed by the turnout and the enthusiasm. I couldn’t even get into the room to see Jonathan Ames, Gary Shtuynegart and Ben Greenman, so thick was the crowd, but I did get to chat with Danny Simmons of Def Poetry who told me the good news that the show’s new season will be taping soon (I’m hoping to …

David Bowman delivers an absolute rave in today’s New York Times Book Review for Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone, a “hillbilly noir” that I’m also currently enjoying. This novel about a teenage girl in the Arkansas Ozarks trying to fend off homelessness caused by her crank-cooking father seems to be causing some kind of sensation, and I’m looking forward to writing more about it soon.

The raves keep coming: David Kamp is crazy about Mark Haddon’s A Spot of Bother, the young author’s much discussed …

1. The Brooklyn Book Festival is taking place this Saturday at Borough Hall (downtown near the Bridge). Hey, I remember not too many years ago when there was one writer (Norman Mailer) known to be living in Brooklyn. Of course, there’s also the spirit of Betty Smith. I’ll be at the fair, hanging out at the Metaxu Cafe booth. Come by if you can.

2. I like Ed Champion’s description of Katie Couric’s unfortunate new blog, which …