The Believer Book Award shortlist. Local favorites S P R A W L and The Orange Eats Creeps are included. Melville House is presenting a new thing, The Indie Booksellers Choice Awards. John Ashbery translated Rimbaud’s Illuminations, and that’s coming out in May, and here’s a rad excerpt over at alan’s blog.

Need a job or a date? Finally all your reading pays off! On the east coast, Melville House is hiring on their editorial team and on the west, the San Francisco Public Library is hosting speed dating events. A Library in Chattanooga, TN is also hosting literary dating events, but bless your heart if you live there. Let us know how beers with the Bukowski fan goes…

Hot shit flies in this fly shit at Interview where Will Oldham interviews R Kelly: “It’s like you go to parties and they give you these lit­tle bags. I got everything I can ever want, and I’ve been blessed, but I want that little bag, you know? I want what’s in the bag. You’re like, “Where my bag at, dawg?” And they’re like, “Ah, we ran out, man.””

It looks like Open City is closing its pages—a real shame. Issue 30 will be their last and it’s only $10.

Great Sheentences: “I  don’t have burnout my gearbox. I just go.” and “Everything after but is dial tone.” Joyce and Beckett, respectively. And Jean Cocteau said this: “It is excruciating to be an unbeliever with a spirit that is deeply religious.” He sleeps with a good mask, behind the click. And Mike Meginnis made something huge, ASCII, and goodly terrifying looking: Angband, or His 55 Desires.

Your best guess: what percentage of HTMLGIANT do you watch? No one cares.

O Hai some librarians are boycotting HarperCollins because they want to limit how many times an ebook can be ‘checked out.’

James Pate at Montevidayo says some really precise stuff about chaos and art, ending with this (YES): “With both–and with Grosz too, I would say– we’re left with an aesthetic that I like to think of as the abandoned house approach to art. You go in and wander around, but no one lives there anymore.”

Your best guess: what percentage of HTMLGIANT do you read?

“…working class intellectuals like big words and their sentence formation is excessively ornate. It’s what they think of as ‘smart.’ Pomposity. It’s an embarrassing condition of being unsophisticated and not knowing what is truly smart which is simplicity and modernism…” —Eileen Myles

“Context“

Your best guess: how many books in your personal library have you read more than once?