Friday's Literary Handbag

Friday's Literary Grab Bag. It's Magic!

Pick which hand. Go ahead, pick. We have a literary grab bag behind our back and we are ready to share. But you have to pick which hand. Will it be this hand, with Kurt Vonnegut’s new e-book, an analysis of John Keats’ home, and Salon’s Literary Guide to the World? Or do you prefer this hand, with an Emerson College alum’s debut book and an essay on the Spanish Civil War? Hurry up, these hands are getting tired. Huuuuurrrry…huuuuurrry. Fine. Spoil sport. You can have the damn literary grab bag and everything else that’s in there. It was supposed to be a surprise. Yeah, there’s more: the winner of San Jose State’s infamous bad writing prize and a look at the staying power of the Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides. Happy Friday, you big jerk. We hope you’re happy.  – Kevin Murphy

– Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a travel guide devoted not to restaurants, hotels and museums, but to the literature of a place? Yes, it would. So here it is: Salon’s Literary Guide to the World. It’s a grand name, to be sure, but one that suits. From Turkey to Togo, D.C. to L.A., Rio to Russia and beyond, the Guide promises to recommend the best books — fiction, history, memoir or otherwise — to take with you on your travels. — Global Literature in Salon

Pointing Fingers at Old War Crimes

– Last September Spain’s homegrown “super-judge” Baltasar Garzón—best-known for his dramatic 1998 effort to arrest the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in London— announced that he was investigating not only the whereabouts of the remains of the “disappeared” of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), but also the huge numbers of defeated Republicans executed by General Francisco Franco in the grim postwar years. — The Spanish Civil War in the Boston Review

– “Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin’ off Nantucket Sound from the nor’ east and the dogs are howlin’ for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the “Ellie May,” a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin’ and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests.” — Winner for Bad Writing in the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest

– Dzanc Books is excited to announce that Laura van den Berg’s short story collection, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, has been selected by Barnes and Noble to be a Discover Great Books pick for the Holiday season. — New Writers in Dzanc Books

Cruising for New Material

– Former Paris Review editor James Scott Linville remembers receiving chapter one of what would become The Virgin Suicides. He had seen Eugenides’ writing before. About six years earlier, Eugenides had sent in a short story called “Capricious Gardens.” An intern had fished it out of the slush pile and handed it to Linville. “It was terrific, but it wasn’t right for us,” remembers Linville. — Celebrating The Virgin Suicides in the Daily Beast

– Mercifully, the window through which the poet John Keats gazed in the last tormented months of his short life was painted a gentle soft grey – not the Windsor soup brown or revolting puce that building historians have proved was the original colour of some of the woodwork in his last London home. — John Keats in the Guardian

– Kurt Vonnegut’s longtime publisher will release a sneak preview of a collection of his unpublished stories via e-book. Two of the short stories will be released in the next few months — Hello Red on Aug. 25 and The Petrified Ants on Sept. 29. — Vonnegut in CBC.CA

Video: A Tribute to Kurt Vonnegut