This is what all talent/literary/federal agents look like. It's code.

1.  Literary agent Nathan Bransford of Curtis Brown, Ltd. is offering readers the chance to play Literary Agent for a Day over at his blog. It’s pretty simple:  Read the posted queries, pick the queries you think belong to books about to actually be published, win ______ (he hasn’t specified the prize).

2.  Via Matt Briggs, an essay from Frederick Barthelme published in 1988. I’m sure quite a few of you have read this already, but I hadn’t.  I think the essay is definitely worth talking about, still.

3.  Interview Magazine writes about Five Dials, a .pdf/email distributed literary journal.  Hey, who knew this interweb thing could be used for like, literature and stuff?

I’ve already blabbed about this stuff elsewhere, if you’d like a quicker river.