Chris Kraus delivers an excellent review of the first comprehensive biography of Simone Weil. This functions as a good intro to Weil’s philosophy, too.

VIDA has tallied the gender (im)balance in The Best American series. In their press release they ask, “What careers stalled because gender bias plays a role in preventing a writers’ work from reaching a national audience?”

It’s a scary thought. Is it also a fair question?

Best book on Vietnam War: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, otherwise?

In New York graffiti’s Golden Age, one of it’s most respected and prolific writers was—according to the eye witness account of another writer—a shy, eldery white woman who simply wanted everyone to accept Jesus. How will you spend your dotage?

Mulholland Drive, the TV pilot. From Mark Gluth (and the Dennis Cooper blog), Didion vs. Lynch.

LOL re Dale Peck: “Literature cannot be saved, because literature saves us. When it no longer saves us, it is no longer literature.”

Amazon is going to publish. I’m surprised it’s taken this long.

What are you reading right now and how is it?

I can’t believe people actually quote from How Fiction Works.

“We need critics who set impatient standards, ask uncomfortable questions, and maintain an omnivorous appetite for the unfamiliar, the awkward, the angry, the untoward. Instead, we have a gated community, a velvet-roped garden party, a Brooklyn vs. Cambridge fantasy baseball league. We don’t need critics obsessed with the real, or with whether the novel is alive or dead. We need critics willing to look at the novels that are already out there, going about their business, quietly making the future of literature, whether “we” like it or not.” — from Jess Row’s provocative and expansive “The Novel is Not Dead” in the Boston Review, which has so far scored a Benjamin Kunkel self-defense in the comments; so, you know, bombs away.