1. Look at this beauty. It’s a new facsimile edition of a past illustrated premium of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, known as the Splendid Edition. Oxford University Press has published it as a replica of the original object, and it’s attractive enough to get me started reading the book for the first time. The first few pages present a witty tale of manners and intrigue among Southern gentleman, in a tone somewhat reminiscent of Dickens or Thackeray. Good enough to keep me reading.

2. Augusten Burroughs’s beleageured mother Margaret Robison has written her own side of the Running With Scissors story, a book called The Long Journey Home.

3. Like CBGB’s before it, New York City’s great Chelsea Hotel is going “upscale”. There goes another one. It’s still unclear whether or not the hotel will retain its unique arts-friendly environment, but the hotel just temporarily shut its doors to guests (happily, though, they’re not kicking out the many regulars who live there, among which remain quite a few Beat poets, punk rockers, abstract expressionists and former Warhol superstars living on the down-low). I just hope the new owners don’t destroy this cool hotel, and I hope they keep the paintings in the staircase.

4. Carolyn Kellogg has written a literary guide to Los Angeles.

5. Walter Kirn on Joseph Heller.

6. Emily Gould on The Bell Jar at 40.

7. Terry Gilliam might be making a movie of Paul Auster’s Mr. Vertigo. We say go for it, why the hell not.

8. Martin Scorsese, meanwhile, will be releasing a movie of The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick, apparently featuring Sasha Baron Cohen

9. The Found Generation.

10. Garth Risk Hallberg.

11. Now that’s a title: Edouard Levé’s ‘Suicide’ and Edouard Levé’s Suicide by Mark O’Connell.

12. Push Pop Press Acquired by Facebook. Clearly a sign of the times, whatever it means.

13. Fantagraphics is releasing new editions of the great Zap Comix from the 1968 Charley Plymell/Robert Crumb/Gilbert Shelton era. And here’s their new The Pin-Up Art of Humorama, featuring some surprisingly raunchy cartoon work from Bill Hoest, Basil Wolverton and even Mad Magazine’s straight-laced David Berg.

14. Finally: Lives Well Shared: the friendship of Philip Whalen and Gary Snyder by David Schneider.