Oh man, remember hyperlink novels? My favorite is 253 by Geoff Ryman.  It offers up a heavy dose of gamesmanship a la Cortazar, but written by a science fiction novelist, in HTML.  Because nothing expands the horizons of what the novel can do like being able to click on blue underlined words.  Really though, I do love that one.  I’m just glad we’ve come so far since then.

~ "The long white beard makes you look like Santa or a wizard." There’s a timely valentine to Darwin in the latest issue of A Public Space.

~ Colm Toibin writes on Edward Carpenter’s fearless nineteenth century homosexuality and socialism. Toibin, remember, will be one among many great speakers discussing Obama’s literary influences in our store this Friday.

~ Leonard Lopate spoke to belgian novelist Amelie Nothomb on Wednesday and yes she was charming and casually arrogant, but not nearly as entertaining, I promise, as she will be in our store this Thursday evening.

~ Look, Mr. Gaiman, I know you have a new movie to sell us on, but could you please be less British?  It’s creeping me out.

~ Here’s Frank Kermode discussing Milton. Think of it as a dry digestif of smart to follow the course of stupid just below.

~ "But then, Jedediah Killinger III was not an ordinary man.  He was a man who made his own rules and called his own game." The Pitch presents "Killinger!", your new favorite book.

~ Bookslut has a lengthy interview up with Brian Michael Bendis, the comics writer who spilled John Hughes in your Spiderman.

~ We haven’t posted much about Updike’s death here, but last week  The New Yorker ran a series of short but lovely remembrances, the best being this by Eugenides. 

~ See also Adam Gopnik’s brief tribute to the man and, behind a subscription wall, a magnificent collection of excerpts from Updike’s own writing for the magazine.

~ Should we trust Google with the entirety of our textual history and intellectual output? Whoops! Too Late!

~ Lou Anders, one of the best SF editors today, fawns over Adam Roberts, one of the best SF writers today.  I’d like to mock him for his adoration, but it’s too damn deserved.

~ Stephen Colbert would like his Newbery medal now please.

~ What is the worth of the statement if it cannot protect the man? Amartya Sen discusses the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the latest New Republic.

~ For more on that great statement of shared value, here’s an animated version of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which turned 60 this past fall.  Good font work, too.

~ Does taking a photo entail an obligation toward its subject? Vollmann discusses photography and social contract in the latest Bookforum.

~ Poor T.C. Boyle. He showed up to the party wearing the same dress as Nancy Horan.

One problem with being a curious, literate human being is time allotment.  Should you read that novel, the latest issue of your favorite magazine?  God forbid you subscribe to a newspaper.  Maybe you should just throw your time away watching grainy videos of baby foxes playing on a trampoline.  It certainly couldn’t be any less worthwhile than the thousands of other diversions out there, right?  I pull out some things of interest from the internet for you and put them on our front page, but I know better than anyone that they just add to your burden, so I’m sorry.  And here ya go.

~ Maira Kalman paints, revels in, the inauguration.

~ The Cosmonaut of the Erotic Future, in which are discussed Gagarin, Levinas, Heidegger, James Bond, St. Joseph, quivering flesh in a can, and the single best reason you’ll ever find for subscribing to the Journal of Hand Surgery.

~ The world of Rae Armantrout’s poetry is "someting we recognize intimately - and at the same instant montrous," writes Ron Silliman.

~ Trees into books into trees once again.

~ Wait, you mean Bolaño may not have taken heroin or been imprisoned by Pinochet? Disgusting. I’m going to take his worthless and utterly unreadable books to the curb right now.

~ John Updike died today.  He was 76.  Who is fit to eulogize a writer of his voice and stature?

~ What do women want? Daniel Bergner discusses the complex science of female desire in the Times and, on February 2nd, in our store.

~ Adam Kirsch is a bit relieved that Elizabeth Alexander’s inauguration poem was not soaring, or even memorable.  It was, he writes, "not public but bureaucratic."

~ "spent my hours in town in cough on pillow  sigh sigh  but back now". All interviews should be conducted by email, with no caps, and their subject should always be poet Abraham Smith.

~ Charles Bock, author of Beautiful Children, discusses his next novel. He’s going to be a wealthy wealthy man.  See him talk with editor David Ebershoff in our store this Monday.

~ W. D. Snodgrass is dead.  Maybe now is a good time to hear what he has to say.

~ And yes, of course, baby foxes on a trampoline.  Glee.

Here’s a baker’s dozen of previous links from our front page.  Some might be a little stale by now, but all have a gooey filling of literary interest that make them worth visiting or revisiting if you tried them the first time around.  And yes, I would be a terrible baker.  Always count those donuts, folks.

~ Time Out interviews Paul Maliszewski, a connoisseur of and dabbler in plagiarism, hoaxery, and literary snake oils.  He’ll be reading in the store February 18th.

~ The classiest book you will ever read.

~ Arne Næss, your favorite Norwegian ecological philosopher, died this Monday at 96.  n+1 has reposted an essay on his legacy.

~ Hear Robert Frost’s recitation of two poems at Kennedy’s inauguration, one from memory and one, thankfully, aborted because he couldn’t read the page on which it was written.

~ Thank God for the long tail.  Scott Esposito talks to New Directions’ Declan Spring about running a small press under the storm clouds.

~ DC will be sold out of cupcakes. Not so our cafe!  Come watch the inauguration with us, fellow bookworms and tea-junkies, projected live and large in our cafe this Tuesday morning.

~ Matt Taibbi wants to see Thomas Friedman cry salty well-deserved tears into his silly porn-stache.

~ Bush and Cheney each plan to write memoirs highlighting some of the tough choices they were forced to make in office.  Don’t bother guys, I think this Harper’s Index sums it up pretty well.<

~ Verlaine, Rimbaud, and the lice they loved to share, all in an excerpt from Edmund White’s incredible new biography of the boy genius.

~ Morton Smith, Carpocrates, and the possible forgery that points to Christ the libertine magician.

~ When storytelling is survival, your vocabulary becomes sexy. Seed Magazine interviews Denis Dutton, author of "The Art Instinct".

~ The NEA says adults are reading more, particularly fiction. I guess that’s good news, though I’m unnerved to learn that there is anyone at all who doesn’t regularly read for pleasure.

Here are some more links we’ve had recently on our front page.  That doesn’t mean they’ll be entertaining or anything, I suppose.  It’s not as if we were arbiters of all that is funny or worthwhile on the internet. (We are arbiters of all that is funny or worthwhile on the internet.) Stil, if you’re going to be clicking on things anyway, these things will do as well as any others.  Have at ‘em.

~ Emily Dickinson takes a stroll therough the uncanny valley.

~ Will Sheff of the band Okkervil River reads Tolstaya’s "Okkervil River" and all is right with the world. 

~ Here’s a short but enticing book trailer for a new anthology about money in relationships, "The Secret Currecy of Love". See Hilary Black and contributors discuss the book this Monday in our store.

~ Inger Christensen, one of the greatest European poets of our time, died last Friday.

~ We’ve taken the plunge and created a Facebook page.  Come scribble on our wall.

~ "If I don’t win, I won’t really mind not having the acclaim, it’s not getting the money that I will mind. Because I’m always terribly broke, and how wonderful it would be to get that lovely cheque". Diana Athill, who has indeed won the Costa Award and the accompanying check at 91, as interviewed in The Guardian.

~ Dr. Johnson turns 300 this year. To celebrate, Yale’s Beinecke library has started a word-a-day blog of words from his marvelous dictionary.  Today’s entry: a’fterwit.

~ Jessa Crispin has a long and wonderful interview with Clayton Eshleman, poet and translator of Vallejo among others, up in this month’s Bookslut. 

~ The latest issue of Words Without Borders features fiction by Indonesian women. One of the more interesting: "Maybe Not Yem" by Etik Juwita.

~ Here’s a recording of Amitav Ghosh reading from his new epic "Sea of Poppies."

~ Arthur Conan Doyle believed in voices from beyond the grave. Now hear his, along with Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin and others, all sounding more pompous and ridiculous than you could ever imagine.

Here are some links we’ve posted recently on our front page.  I didn’t want to put them up again after they’d been bumped down, but your mom called and told me how torn up you were, so here you go.  You big baby.

~ John Bolton and John Yoo are my new favorite comedy duo. They’re so zany!

~ Charles Olson reads "The Librarian", an excellent advertisement for the chemistries of scotch and American poetry, but it left me wondering, who’s Frank Moore?

~ From the VQR blog, two views of Bush’s departure. Somehow the National Review cover seems the sharper mockery.

~ John Clute is the greatest living critic of genre fiction, and I’ve rarely seen him better than in this dissection of Jo Walton’s "Small Change" series in Strange Horizons.

~ David Grossman remains the most reasoned commenter on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.  He also remains ignored.

~ Ariel Levy reviews the newly revised "The Joy of Sex" in the latest New Yorker. Conclusions?  Less hairy, much less offensive, and maybe less fun. 

~ Win McCormack, author of "You Don’t Know Me: A Citizen’s Guide to Republican Family Values,"  gives advice on the classiest ways to torpedo a political career.  One tip: hypocrisy. Win will be reading in our store Tuesday at 7.

~ Bernard Madoff’s literary predecessors.

~ Hillary Mantel has an excellent piece of memoir about her time in Saudi Arabia in the latest LRB.

~ Americans are still terrified of and outraged by penguins. And why not?  Their waddle is so lewd, don’t you think?

~ Rwanda has become a nation dominated by women.  It cannot help but be a better place for it.

~ Thousands of Americans fled to Russia to find some relief during the (first) great depression. Some of them found a gulag instead.  Adam Hoschild reviews "The Forsaken" by Tim Tzouliadis.

~ I will never ever fall out of love with  Roberto Bolaño.  Exhibit A: "And then there is no choice but to write."

~ "I sold my hair to buy you these BRAINS."

~ Harp & Altar has posted their fifth issue. Of particular note, poems by G.C. Waldrep and Claire Donato and three excellent stories by Robert Walser.

~ And it is Mark and Scott — not "Chad and Ted” — who partake of cigarettes and “furtive man-on-man action.”

~ It’s about a month old, but I quite like this interview on the Granta site with Nigerian priest and writer Uwem Akpan about his twinned vocations. 

~ Maud Newton discusses the tropes of "atrocity kitsch fiction" with short story writer Anya Ulinich.

Much as I like the idea of textual ephemerality, that’s just not what the internet is about.  What we cast out there into that wide digital world remains, haunts us, right?  Well, perhaps obsolescence is a problem, but from here on in, until the Big Crash brings down the series of tubes and justifies that crate of canned artichoke hearts under my bed, let’s just pretend that what happens on the internet is forever, shall we?  With that in mind I’ll be posting here on our blog all the links that we run on our front page (here if you’ve somehow missed it).  Here are the fifteen most recent.

   • Mark Sarvas argues for books (bought from indie stores) as the best gift and even backs it up with fake math.

   • Cheryl Sucher, bookseller and resident tap-dance aesthete, has a piece in the latest Publisher’s Weekly discussing finances, our store and particularly you, our book-hungry customers.

   • Cynthia Ozick has been given this year’s PEN/Nabokov award. Her acceptance speech is a beautiful discussion of ghosts, both literary and political, and PEN has made it available in text and audio.

   • Here is perhaps the best reason I’ve seen to throw over taste and ideals and write whatever the hell will keep the cash coming.

   • The Quarterly Conversation is excellent this time around. Of particular note: Gaddis as the last Protestant, an audio interview with Aleksandar Hemon, a contest to win all the Bolaño you’ll ever need and a dozen solid reviews.

   • If Thomas Pynchon’s newest book jacket reminds you of the impossible love child of Elmore Leonard, Thomas Kinkade and Gidget, you have only Pynchon to blame.

   • Also in Dissent, Richard Wolin (to my mind one of the best intellectuals writing today) discusses two recent books that argue for a return to Enlightenment morality and seeks to clarify what, exactly, that means.

   • In the latest Dissent, Benjamin Kunkel discussed a rash of recent apocalyptic and dystopic novels and questions their fiercely apolitical ethics, which pit "family values against the cannibal universe."

   • The Guardian has a clip of Phillip Pullman reading from Milton’s "Paradise Lost", apparently by flashlight in an abandoned metro tunnel.

   • Shalom Auslander goes to Israel, doubts Yasser Arafat was a happy-go-lucky kid, gets yelled at a lot, eats testicles, comes home.

   • Tariq Ali has a wrenching piece on honor killings in the latest LRB.

   • Our Events Coordinator and resident chin-up champion Jessica discusses her ten favorite books of the past year over at her site, including an upset for "Favorite book featuring vampires and teenagers."

   • In case you spent November in a post-election haze, euphoric or otherwise, NPR has audio and a nice review of Carl Capotorto reading from his new "Twisted Head; An Italian American Memoir" in our cafe last month.

   • Zadie Smith’s recent talk at the NYPL was, by all accounts, excellent.  You can listen to it on the WNYC page here.

   • Moth fingers and cat tongues win this year’s Bad Sex Award.