• What if the U.S. poet laureate nominee was required to go through Senate confirmation hearings, like other Administration nominees?
• Rake's Progress whittles M. Dirda's latest book chat down to aphorisms.
• Zombie apocalypse novels to get serialized.

It's not the complete book, but it's a lot of it. Authors and stories to appear in Best American Short Stories 2004 include,

-Charles D'Ambrosio, "Screenwriter," The New Yorker
-John Edgar Wideman, "What We Cannot Speak About We Must Pass Over in Silence" (excerpt), Harper's
-Jill McCorkle, "Intervention," Ploughshares
-Mary Yukari Waters "Mirror Studies," Zoetrope: All-Story
-Sarah Shun-lien Bynum (possibly for "Accomplice," from The Georgia Review)
-R. T. Smith, "Docent," Missouri Review
-Trudy Lewis, "Limestone Diner" (excerpt), Meridian
-Angela Pneuman, "All Saints Day," Virginia Quarterly Review

("Moore calls the collection 'a kind of group portrait of how humanity is currently faring,' and one gets the impression that it's faring poorly in rather consistent ways," writes Kirkus Reviews. The full review is available only to subscribers.)

Update, 6:50 pm: According to a GC reader, BASS 2004 will also include Nell Freudenberger's "The Tutor," as well as stories by Updike, Antonya Nelson, TC Boyle, Paula Fox, and Alice Munro.

book-related games and diversions

• Big Dick Lit: erection references in literature
• Poezy: writing toys, games, & gizmoz
• Classic Books Crossword (PDF)
• Alphabetilately: pictorial alphabets
• Guardian Quiz: Are You a Good Speller?
• The Oscar Wilde Quote Generator

Reader Claire Zulkey turns our attention to Simon Spotlight's upcoming titles, including Breaking Up With Your Hairdresser: How to Lie, Fake, Maneuver Your Way out of Awkward Situations, The Hookup Handbook: A Girl's Guide to Non-Dating, and Not Proud: A Smorgasbord of Shame -- which, according to Cindy Adams, includes this "nicety," among others: "Put poison on your ex-husband's underwear so he thinks he has a disease."

Quickly branded by the media as Simon & Schuster's "ditz-lit division," the Simon Spotlight imprint launched earlier this month with He's Just Not That Into You: The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys, written by the sexperts behind HBO's "Sex and the City" series. According to the NY Daily News, Simon & Schuster is counting on the SATC writers and "other media-savvy authors to turn [the] new imprint ... into a brand for readers 18 to 34 years old."

In a year old Viacom press release, Simon Spotlight's Executive Vice President, Robin Corey, reflected on the imprint's target audience and their "mediacentric" sensibilities. "We have watched these readers grow up," Corey said, "progressing from Nickelodeon favorites like Rugrats and Blue's Clues to more challenging fiction or tie-ins like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. We are determined to stay with them as their tastes develop and mature."

The publicity sheet for The Hookup Handbook, which incited a five publisher-auction, explains the book like this: "All over the world, from dusk to dawn, millions of singles go out, party, meet other singles, and inevitably, hook up. It's the new nondating, and it's here to stay." Aww, look: Simon's kids are all grown up.

November 3, 1968

Sir,

... Aside from your extraordinary abuse of the semicolon, [ your piece, "Ode to an Apple Fritter"] utterly fails to reflect the turbulence of our times, the political upheaval, and dawning cosmic consciousness, and the allusion to the fall of man was pretentious at best. ("Behold! the fritter of good and evil.") More successful was the sexuality intimated in "your sugar-laced grottoes and your vall-ays," even if your rhyme scheme again reared its ugly, strict head and slaughtered your metaphor.

The Morning News's Grady Miller tracks the correspondence between "a desperate poet" and "his unfortunate editor" at Flotsam, a Quarterly of Poetry and the Arts.

The NY Times sends in dispatches from GC's Personalized Hell, aka the annual convention of Christian romance and fiction writers:

... In the mornings the group prayed together, asking God to help guide their pens and thoughts. At the conference bookstore, romantic novels shared table space with guides to home schooling. Nearby was a private prayer room for short breaks, and a few writers sang hymns around the hotel piano. "So many people come here to learn to write, and they meet God along the way," said the conference organizer, Brandlyn Collins.

According to the Times, the National Endowment for the Arts' report on Americans' reading habits found that "observant Christians were the only group of Americans reading more than in the past." And now, Christian and secular romance houses are responding to the trend by packaging "Christian chick lit" lines, featuring "Bridget Jones types looking for the right man, the right chocolate, the right friends - and the right relationship with God."

Anne Rice, according to Anne Rice, doesn't deserve negative Amazon reviews, but those who write them do.

From Rice's Sep.6 Amazon rant (voted a "helpful review" by 36 of its 155 readers, and [mis-]titled, "From the Author to the Some of the Negative Voices Here"):

Seldom do I really answer those who criticize my work. In fact, the entire development of my career has been fueled by my ability to ignore denigrating and trivializing criticism as I realize my dreams and my goals. However there is something compelling about Amazon's willingness to publish just about anything, and the sheer outrageous stupidity of many things you've said here that actually touches my proletarian and Democratic soul. Also I use and enjoy Amazon and I do read the reviews of other people's books in many fields. In sum, I believe in what happens here. And so, I speak. First off, let me say that this is addressed only to some of you, who have posted outrageously negative comments here, and not to all. You are interrogating this text from the wrong perspective. Indeed, you aren't even reading it. You are projecting your own limitations on it. And you are giving a whole new meaning to the words "wide readership." And you have strained my Dickensean principles to the max. I'm justifiably proud of being read by intellectual giants and waitresses in trailer parks,in fact, I love it, but who in the world are you? Now to the book.

While you're on Amazon, you can also check out Rice's "Friends and Favorites" page and read some of her many reviews, including a passionate five-star defense of The Passion of the Christ (Widescreen Edition).

David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, Colm Toibin's The Master, Achmat Dangor's Bitter Fruit, Sarah Hall's The Electric Michelangelo, and Gerard Woodward's I'll Go to Bed at Noon make the cut. More news here, here, and here.