Lots of great in the Rumpus’s Last Book I Loved column. What’s the last book you loved?

The fucking word of the day is ‘milieu.’

An overview of the Nook, a new e-reader from Barnes & Noble; oh, and there’s this:

And hey, great news for book cover designers… your craft will be preserved in the space of a postage stamp.

UPDATE: It’s here, and it features some good stuff: ‘Share favorite eBooks with your friends, family, or book club. Most eBooks can be lent for up to 14 days at a time. Just choose the book you want to share, then send it to your friend’s reader, cell phone, or computer.’  and  ‘Visit the store, turn on your nook, and see what pops up on your screen. It’s as simple as that. You will get exclusive content, special discounts and more. And soon, you will be able to read entire eBooks for free at your local Barnes & Noble.

To continue the discussion of theory and creative writing, a little excerpt from a Lorrie Moore piece in NYRB about mid-century Latin American writer Clarice Lispector:

“In France she was viewed as a philosopher–and at times it does seem that calling her a novelist is a little like calling Plato a playwright–but when she attended a literary conference where her work was discussed in theoretical terms, Lispector left the panel early, saying later that not understanding a word that was being said about her own work made her so hungry that she had to go home and eat an entire chicken.”

American Short Fiction put together a list of ‘spooky reads’ but I don’t know, seems lacking. What books truly scare you? [Bonus link: if you haven’t been keeping up with DC’s, he’s been making amazing Halloween-style posts all month.]

Mine’s worth ’37.’ What’s yours?

The question, then, is why novelists have ceded their ground to science. And from the writer’s perspective, if not from the reader’s, an allegorical interpretation of the neuronovel does seem possible. Is the interest in neurological anomaly not symptomatic of an anxiety about the role of novelists in this new medical-materialist world, which happens also to be a world of giant publishing conglomerates and falling reading rates? Are novelists now, in their own eyes and others’, only special cases, without specialized and credentialed knowledge, who may at best dispense accurate if secondhand medical (or historical or sociological) information in the form of an entertaining fictional narrative? And is the impulse to write not an inexplicable compulsion, a category of disorder outside the range of normal?

-from The Rise of the Neuronovel / n+1

Michael Kimball interviews Rachel Sherman (author of the brand new novel Living Room from Open City) for the Faster Times.

Would you submit your ‘work’ to joesdickshed.blogspot.com? Under what criteria would this be a lucrative ‘market’ for your work?

Have you ever written a story/poem/text that you thought you’d have to trash, but then ‘saved’ it somehow? If so, how?