Thursday's Flurry of Words

Hamlet On Xbox: To Play Or Not To Play

To play or not to play. To smoke or not to smoke. To love or not to love — three quandaries taken up by the writers of the articles in today’s literature news. And while we appreciate the quandary of whether or not to give over your heart to another human being, we do not appreciate the quandary of whether or not to have a smoke while visiting a friend on his death bed. In case you didn’t hear, Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens are currently engaged in a public dispute with the widow of a well-known British editor who claims that Amis puffed a fag and overstayed his welcome while standing in the bedroom of her soon-to-die-husband, Mark Boxer. If that’s not distasteful enough, video games are looking to classic novels for inspiration (someone find me some Tylenol!!!). Elsewhere, Martin Page explains the romance of getting dumped in Bookslut, Salman Rushdie makes a splash in Hotlanta, and Robert Pinksy lends his discerning eye to a new contest. Last but not least, The Stranger trains its commie-leaning ways on a new book about “Russia” and “Dreams” and “Overcoming Struggle”. Hail hail literary agitprop! — Kevin Murphy

– Artistically, many classic novels could work well in video game format. Action is arguably the secondary draw in newer games such as the BioShock franchise, which has gained its following in large part because of the dark mood the game designers have created. While there’s almost nothing in a William Faulkner novel that would translate to a fun video game, the layers of decay and rot that permeate from his books would be the perfect setting for a Resident Evil sequel. — Video Game Literature in SF Gate

– There are, I guess, worse ways to get dumped than by a message on an answering machine. A text message would be pretty bad. A Hello Kitty e-card. A singing telegram. But the answering machine message breakup is a particularly painful kind of romantic torture — not only does it means you’ve been dumped, but it also means you’re one of the 12 people left on Earth who still uses an answering machine. The only way it could be even more humiliating is if the person dumping you is someone you weren’t dating, someone you’ve never even met. — Martin Page in Bookslut

Not A Good Idea

– She adduced two stories in evidence – one was that Amis had been a lousy godfather to her child, a charge he accepted in his retaliatory letter to the paper. The second concerned the visit to Boxer’s deathbed in 1988. As well as claiming that Amis smoked, Ford wrote that he and Hitchens exhausted the sick man with an overlong visit that was “filling in time” before Amis caught a flight; and that Amis showed no sign of tears for his old friend, though he would later document his lachrymosity in a memoir. — Christopher Hitchens in the Guardian

– The archive, curated by Emory’s Associate Professor of English and Director of Asian Studies Deepika Bahri, employs multimedia platforms to tell Rushdie’s story. On display are e-mails and written correspondence from the 1970s through 2006, and the exhibit includes letters between Rushdie and people such as U2′s Bono and then-Sen. Barack Obama. — Salman Rushdie in the AJC

– After this period, we will take these top twenty voted-for nominees, and the four main daily editors of 3 Quarks Daily (Abbas Raza, Robin Varghese, Morgan Meis, and Azra Raza) will select six finalists from these, plus they may also add up to three wildcard entries of their own choosing. The three winners will be chosen from these by former U.S. Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky, who, we are extremely pleased, has agreed to be the final judge. — Robert Pinksy in 3 Quarks Daily

– The beautiful truth about novels is that they can be so many things: a letter, a life, the contents of a drawer. Gina Ochsner’s debut novel, The Russian Dreambook of Color & Flight, is many things all at once. It’s a Bad News Bears–style narrative of a group of unlikely heroes who try to band together and save the day, it’s an elaborate and ridiculous joke told by an Eastern European woman with a filthy sense of humor, and it’s a disheveled apartment building stacked high with stories of poor post-Soviet Russian people who are trying the best they can to carve a life out of the moldy, used-up dreams they’ve been given. — The Russian Dreambook in the Stranger

Video: The Bolshevik’s Romantic Russia