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.