Monday's Body of Work

It's Clear and Blue in the Emerald City

We are home. We visited D.C., a long, enjoyable and frenzied weekend of family and friends. We huddled in a hot house and counted the minutes until the main event: an August wedding. And it went off without a hitch! That’s the good news. The bad news is that traveling so many miles for just one weekend is big-time taxing. Our energy is sapped and now our duties runneth over. Hence today’s tardy posting. But we know our readers are compassionate, right? You forgive us, right? Great. Let us look forward then. Der Spiegel shows us what to do with all those spare body parts. The Wall Street Journal says good reading shouldn’t be hard. Margaret Atwood gets the English treatment, Jacket Copy draws the line between writing and rock n’ roll, and a Bookslut goes Down Under. Finally, Nigeria hosts a regal literary prize and the esteemed journalist Leonard Pitts’ new book is excerpted in NPR. Ah home, it’s where all the best stories are found. — Kevin Murphy

– A good story is a dirty secret that we all share. It’s what makes guilty pleasures so pleasurable, but it’s also what makes them so guilty. A juicy tale reeks of crass commercialism and cheap thrills. We crave such entertainments, but we despise them. Plot makes perverts of us all. — Easy Reading in the Wall Street Journal

What's the Story Here?

– Anatoly Korzhak, a pensioner and former engineer, died in Kiev on August 5, 2004. His body was picked up at 2 a.m. and taken to the forensic medicine institute in the Ukrainian capital. That same night, Korzhak’s daughter, Lena Krat, received a telephone call and was asked to come to the institute as soon as possible the following morning, where she was told she would receive further information. — Body Parts in Der Spiegel

– To my mind, The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake and now The Year of the Flood all exemplify one of the things science fiction does, which is to extrapolate imaginatively from current trends and events to a near-future that’s half prediction, half satire. But Margaret Atwood doesn’t want any of her books to be called science fiction. — Margaret Atwood in the Guardian

– Digital publishing is Jessa Crispin’s speciality. She pioneered online literary criticism in 2002 when she founded Bookslut.com, a lively, informed website that these days gets name-checked in the books pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Guardian. — Jessa Crispin in The Age

Synchronicity is Continuum

– Imagine a Venn diagram with two circles: one for book nerds, one for rock geeks. At the intersection, you’ll find a lot of opinionated people with glasses, having arguments about the exact point in time when a particular author or musician ceased to be cool. — Continuum in Jacket Copy

– The grand finale of this year’s edition of the coveted Nigeria Prize for Literature, sponsored by Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG), is returning to Abuja, the city where it started in 2004. — Nigerian Literature in All Africa

– Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Leonard Pitts has written about everything from the tragedy of September 11th to the death of Michael Jackson. He has collected a selection of his columns in a book, Forward From This Moment. — Leonard Pitts in NPR

Video: Leonard Pitts Jr. on Writing