News Around the Net

The covers to Kurt Vonnegut novels are finally getting redesigned. Does this mean that someone finally realized that multiple books should not look exactly the freaking same?

The top 10 novels of sexual jealousy. You know it's good since every story ever is written about sexual jealousy (at least the ones I've been subjected to), so it's quite the pool to choose from.

Harvard Lampoon has released a satire of Twilight, called, creatively, Nightlight. It features Edwart Mullen, a computer nerd whom everyone believes is a vampire (but he isn't), and klutz Belle Goose, who believes every man in town is in love with her. Again, that is the description of the satire, not Twilight. It tricked me too.

Since no one had ever heard of her, nevermind read any of her work, here's a link to an excerpt to Herta Muller's novel Everything I Own I Carry With Me. It's in English and everything!

The shortlist for the Guardian First Book Award in 2009 have been named. Again, I feel sad because I haven't read any of them and have never heard of any of the authors. The winner will be announced in December. Hold your breath.

Stephen King in Playboy! Poetry, I mean. He wrote a poem which will appear in Playboy. I'm sorry, but there will be no pictorial of Stephen King under an exotic waterfall with a blonde, Norwegian centerfold.

Thomas Pynchon had a cold once. It was in 1973. You want proof? This creepy guy whose father was Pynchon's doctor has an x-ray of his chest from the visit. Seriously. He got a signed copy of Gravity's Rainbow out of it and everything. I guess being prying and creepy pays off.

This is so stupid already. No, fiction's day is not "done". How long have people been saying this? How long will they keep saying it? Does anyone actually believe it? Urgh. Just urgh all around.

Dave Eggers won the French literary prize for best foreign work of fiction, the Prix Medicis, for What Is the What. Personally, I can never forgive him for naming his first book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. No, no, and no.

Speaking of Dave Eggers, here's the coolest, most colorful, most literary, most expensive newspaper ever!

Publisher's Weekly clearly doesn't like the ladies as much as I do: the skinny on their top-ten novels of the year controversy.