FYI, Scott Esposito is leading a group reading of William H. Gass’s The Tunnel over at Conversational Reading. It’s three weeks in, goes until  3 November. Schedule’s here.

The Master is hard to talk about, let’s talk nearby instead.

Is Cormac McCarthy the rural Don DeLillo or is Don DeLillo the urban Cormac McCarthy?

How do you revise, like literally, how do you do it: print and cut, type and delete, erase with an old school eraser, white out, etc.?

JASON BREDLE HAS A NEW BOOK OF POEMS OUT WHAT???

Do you think it’s inappropriate to talk politics on HTMLGiant? Do you tell people who you’re voting for? Are there any honest Republicans out there willing to write a long ideological rant about Mitt Romney? (Please no liberals.)

All of you: Go tell Sam Pink not to give up.

I think you have a duty to contribute, to go on contributing to what Gore Vidal calls “book chat.” For certain self-interested reasons, you want to keep standards up so that when your next book comes out, it’s more likely that people will get the hang of it. I have no admiration for writers who think at a certain point they can wash their hands of book chat. You should be part of the ongoing debate.

Amis, M.

Seems pretty funny/dumb: people selling books to Penguin for more than they are probably worth and then being too lazy to actually write them.

DIED Snippet: On September 14, chronic illness legal advocate Jennifer Jaff passed away. Her advocacy was a reaction to her own diagnosis with Crohn’s disease. Frankly, I don’t even know where to begin talking about the messy maze of health insurance and chronic illness or pre-existing conditions. But I thought this might be a fine place to link to Giant contributor Ken Baumann’s essay on his Crohn’s in Vice Magazine. (And to mention that they have his name spelled wrong in the byline.)(Also, this essay is not sexist.)