Worth Reading In December/January

• David Roth in Defector on the late, great, John Madden.

• Brian Brems in Vague Visages on the 1971 Noir film Klute.

• Chris McGreal in The Guardian on Desmond Tutu’s solidarity with Palestine.

• Chelsea Barabas in Real Life Magazine on the surveillance of minority students in schools.

Worth Reading Recently

• Haruki Murakami's Passion For Jazz.
• Jenny Trout on 50 Shades Of Grey and BDSM.
• The Millions on Italo Calvino's excellent novel Cosmicomics.
• A new interview with Edward Snowden from The Guardian.
• io9's review of the excellent episode of Adventure Time that Masaaki Yuasa did last month.
• An excerpt from Laurie Penny's new book Unspeakable Things.
• A conversation about Haiti and Dominican Republic between Edwidge Danticat and Junot Diaz.
• The Millions reviews Murakami's new novel.
• Wallace Shawn's amazing "translation" of "liberal Hollywood!!!!!"'s justification of slaughtering children in Gaza.
• Ugliness, empathy, and Octavia Butler.

What I Am Reading

• Alternet on the ten scariest states to be an atheist.
• The Guardian’s top 100 non-fiction books. 26/100

Weekly Reader

The Guardian on interactive fiction, partnerships between authors and game developers, and a little bit of Douglas Adams.

Laurie Halse Anderson is interviewed for her new novel Wintergirls.

Open Letters reviews a recently Broadway performance of Waiting For Godot.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick on the recent collaboration between HASTAG and MLA on new tenure guidelines.

Weekly Reader

The New Yorker on Dracula and other Vampire related media.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s very moving tribute to her colleague David Foster Wallace.

Performing Subjectivities: Multi-Mimesis in These Waves of Girls

Jeanette Winterson reviews the new edition of Cosmicomics.

The Guardian interviews Feministing’s Jessica Valenti.

Weekly Reader

New York Times on Orwell’s diaries being blogged on WordPress.

Christopher Sorrentino reviews John Barth’s new novel in Bookforum.

A book of letters between Bernard Henri Levy and Michel Houellebecq will be published soon.

An interesting “first person” piece in The Guardian about asexuality.

Alice Ferrebe’s Digital Orientalism: Japan & Electronic Literature.

Weekly Reader

Here is the last few weekend’s worth of weekend reading…

• The Guardian offers a few excerpts from Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream: Fear & Fantasy In Post 9-11 America.   A lot of what is discussed in these excerpts were the sort of thing that freaked me out “post 9-11″ and prompted me to start writing notes for what would become War Prayers later.

• The Nation recently reprinted one of my favorite Kurt Vonnegut pieces, The Worst Addiction Of Them All.

• Two from The Quarterly Conversation: reviews of Junot Diaz and Vasily Grossman.

• The Little Professor offers a lengthy, and very thoughtful, review of Marc Bousquet’s How The University Works.

• Our weekly two from The Quarterly Conversation: reviews of Mari Akasaka and Jose Maria Eça de Queirós.

• Mother Jones interviews Marjane Satrapi.

• Three from The Quarterly Conversation: Natsume Soseki, Ron Currie Jr., and Selah Saterstrom.