In the mood for a nervous breakdown? We’ve just received a letter from a publicist at Yale Press telling us where we can find one: the Whitney Museum, which is currently hosting an exhibition of work by the visual artist Paul McCarthy. According to the letter, McCarthy’s work “explores the role of mirrors, spinning, and ‘neurotic’ architecture—a feeling of psychological breakdown.” The book that came with the letter, a consideration of McCarthy’s installations and films, aims to disorient by wrapping the title from front to back and flipping it, so that one must rotate and turn the book to read it. Quite tricky, but not nearly enough to make us lose our minds. After this video, however, we did feel a bit queasy.—Macy Halford

Good news today: Kay Ryan has been named the U.S. Poet Laureate, following in the footsteps of such august versifiers as Louise Gluck and Charles Simic. We’ve been lucky enough to publish quite a few of Ryan’s poems over the years, including one of my favorites, “A Cat/ A Future” (Ryan’s writing habits supposedly include curling up in bed with a cat, something I heartily approve of and do regularly myself). The poem ran in our November 27, 1995, issue:

A cat can draw
the blinds
behind her eyes
whenever she
decides. Nothing
alters in the stare
itself but she’s
not there. Likewise
a future can occlude:
still sitting there,
doing nothing rude.

—Jenna Krajeski

• Robert Redford is hosting poetry slams to raise awareness about Global Warming.

• ChinaBounder, the anonymous British blogger who caused a furor two years ago with postings about his amorous escapades in Shanghai, has revealed his identity in hopes of promoting his new book, “Fault Lines on the Face of China: 50 Reasons Why China May Never Be Great.”

• Phidson Mojokeri has taken first prize in the Bessie Head Literature Awards, in Botswana, for his novel “Curse of a Dream.”

• College bookstores hope that Congress will pass a bill allowing them to negotiate fees charged by credit card companies, which, they say, drive prices up for students.

• The KGB Fantastic Fiction reading series is raising funds via a raffle whose prizes include four wormholes, with certificates of ownership signed by the physicist Michio Kaku.

• A first edition of Douglas Adams’s “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” is selling for $25,257.94, and comes with an autographed typewriter that the author purportedly used while writing the science-fiction classic.

At the Shambhala Center of New York this weekend, Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, a young, pony-tailed lama in a sharp grey suit, signed copies of his new book, “Light Comes Through: Buddhist Teachings on Awakening Our Natural Intelligence.” When I kneeled before him to have him sign mine, he said, in a light Tibetan accent, “Best wishes to you,” and smiled sweetly. But the center ran out of books, so many people came up to the lama empty-handed. By way of blessing, Rinpoche picked up a little brass Buddha and bonked the bookless on the top of the head with it.—Trish Deitch

• British writers and academics fret over the loss of literary archives to the United States: “Stuff is bleeding out of this country.”

• The Romanian magazine Observator Cultural has embarked on an ambitious project to translate works by important writers from Romania into English, Chinese, and five other languages.

• The Samuel Johnson Prize for nonfiction has been awarded to Kate Summerscale’s “The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: Or the Murder at Road Hill House,” about a child’s murder case in mid-nineteenth-century London.

• A complete edition of the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novel “The First Circle” will be published in English for the first time, by Harper Perennial.

• Turkey has launched a nationwide effort, the “Turkey Reads Campaign,” to improve its eighty-seven-per-cent literacy rate.

• A crowd in Fairfax, Virginia, gets advice from Barack Obama: “Over the course of four years I made time to read all of the Harry Potter books out loud to my daughters. If I can do that and run for president, then you can find time to read to your kids.”

• The BBC has commissioned a series of poems from Wendy Cope intended to capture public attitudes toward its services. First up: “A is for Archers and Adultery.”

If animals could laugh (forgive us, hyenas), we’re sure they’d be on the floor this month in appreciation of all the loopy, bitter controversy that has gathered steam over Spain’s decision to afford apes certain “human” rights. The most comical argument, from a major news outlet, can be found in The Weekly Standard, which reasons, “Once man is demoted to merely another animal in the forest, universal human rights will have to be tossed out.” (Er, by whom? The orangutans?) Our species will be “humbled to the point where people would willingly sacrifice our own flourishing ‘for the animals’ or to ‘save the planet.’ ” (Do you hear that? It’s the sound of the two hundred and seventy thousand blue-blooded American pigs who will be slaughtered today snorting ironically.)

We were feeling a bit bewildered by the idea that someone would want the right to torture a bonobo or dress a chimp in high heels, so we headed to the book room for guidance. The shelves runneth over: “Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique,” by Michael S. Gazzaniga, looked edifying, and it is—especially the chapter “Would a Chimp Make a Good Date?”:

So your chimp date may not have much of a theory about you, and as a result, anything you do with her will be sort of viewed as being without intention…. She can plan a little, communicate a little, but not with the language skills that we use, probably doesn’t think abstractly, and is mostly going to communicate about her needs.

Conclusion?: “Make my date a Homo sapiens.”

We decided to move away from science into history. “For the Love of Animals: The Rise of the Animal Protection Movement,” by Kathryn Shevelow, informed us that although Aristotle thought humans were the only truly rational animals, Francis of Assisi preached to the birds, and eighteenth-century Britons believed that a woman could give birth to rabbits. Adorable!, we thought, until we came to our era, a time when people apparently like cutting off the beaks of hens before confining them to cages. Fishy business, to be sure. Which brought us to “Tuna: A Love Story,” by Richard Ellis. Happily, its introduction contained a quotation of Oscar Wilde’s, which went a long way toward explaining our current conundrum: “Each man kills the thing he loves.”—Macy Halford

(Photograph: James Mollison)

Just because one is no longer in college doesn’t mean one can’t cling to the vestiges of those four halcyon years. Drinking heavily, for instance, or asking your parents for money. Or, perhaps, reading classic issues of Poetry magazine and considering questions like: “What happened to account for Emily Dickinson’s rise to literary eminence? And what do modernism and imagism have to do with the change in opinions about her work?”

Happily, it turns out that it’s possible to combine all three activities in the relative comfort of your own pitiful starter apartment by accessing the Modernist Journals Project, whose healthy list includes the short-lived Blast, a rag for Ezra Pound’s Vorticists, and its successor The Tyro. For versifiers, there are Wheels, The Owl, and Coterie (in addition to Poetry, whose first cover seems to suggest some sort of Poets’ Round Table).

If one misses anything about college days, it will be the fundamental pleasure (or displeasure) of the grading process. Although, if you’re lucky, like me, you get graded on your response to one question—”Do you like this poet’s work? Why or why not?”—every single day.—Jenna Krajeski

• One year after their shops were destroyed, booksellers in one of Baghdad’s literary centers are once again opening their doors.

• Germaine Greer fumes over a play by Joanna Murray Smith, “The Female of the Species,” based loosely on a kidnapping episode in Greer’s life and opening this week in London’s West End: “She holds feminism in contempt.”

• “Frontera,” a forgotten screenplay by Gabriel García Márquez, will be brought to the screen by the Mexican actor and producer Rodolfo de Anda.

• Sue Alexander, the author of “Nadia the Willful” and other popular books for young readers, has died at the age of seventy-four.

• The twelve-year-old winner of a Scottish competition to write a blurb for an imaginary book will have her story idea—about six girls in a “ghostly game of hide and seek”—turned into a real book, to be written by the children’s author Catherine MacPhail.

• A university in Indiana formally apologizes to a janitor accused of racial harassment. The janitor’s offense? Openly reading a book on the Ku Klux Klan during his breaks.

We were both delighted and filled with anxiety by the news that Gillian Anderson is set to produce and star in a biopic about Martha Gellhorn. Delighted because Gellhorn lived a sensational life—apart from being one of Hemingway’s wives and a buddy of Eleanor Roosevelt’s, she was an intrepid chronicler of twentieth-century wars and an accomplished writer of fiction, letters, and travel memoirs (The New Yorker ran three of her pieces in the nineteen-thirties). Anxious because when the book on which the movie will be based—Caroline Moorehead’s nuanced “Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life”—was published, in 2003, reviewers couldn’t agree on whether the story was tragic or triumphant. “Depressing,” Brenda Maddox declared in the Times. “To read about her life is to lose faith in the nobility of journalism.” Maddox pointed to Gellhorn’s divorces, abortions, and suicide (by a poison pill, when she was eighty-nine, ill, and nearly blind) as evidence of a miserable person who “never felt deep love.”

Maddox’s reading infuriated Katha Pollitt, who fumed in a letter to the paper, “Nothing about the quality of Gellhorn’s writing, no attempt to assess its importance…or place Gellhorn in context as either a writer or a woman.” Weren’t there, she asked,

rather a lot of brilliant, ambitious female writers in the mid-20th century who didn’t fit the chaste, dutiful, self-sacrificing wife-mother role and who tied themselves up in knots trying, with unhappy results?

Since the moviemakers must inevitably put a spin on things, we hope that they err on Pollitt’s side and give us a lively portrait of a writer. If only for the sake of the viewers, Gellhorn should be spared the fate of Dorothy Parker and Sylvia Plath: their biopics, you’ll recall, presented lives so dismally drained of joy that one wondered how the ladies ever found the wherewithal to pick up a pen.—Macy Halford

(Photograph:Topham/The Image Works)

In a 2006 article in the magazine The Good Book Business, Daniel Radosh wrote about the Bible-publishing industry, which generates more than half a billion dollars a year in sales, and markets titles to every imaginable interest group: surfers, cowboys, brides, teen-agers, and couples among them (you can view a number of them here). To this list will soon be added environmentalists, when HarperOne publishes “The Green Bible” this fall. A press kit for the book notes that it is printed on “10% recycled paper” and has scriptural passages related to the theme of “creation care” highlighted in green soy-based ink. It will also include a study guide, in which weekly readings instruct readers “to find an actual stone or other memento from nature so that by the time they finish the study guide they will have created a small memorial to mark their journey.”—Andrea Walker

• Tomorrow may serve as a prequel to November 4: John McCain’s “Why Courage Matters” and Barack Obama’s “The Audacity of Hope” are both set to be released in mass-market paperback editions.

• A collection of rare and out-of-print books that closed with the Chelsea branch of Barnes and Noble will have a second life at the chain’s Lincoln Center outpost.

• In a newly discovered stash of letters that will be auctioned at Sotheby’s this week, Vita Sackville-West writes about Virginia Woolf: She “wasn’t all cool intellect by any means…. She applied alarmingly high standards, but her love and humanity were real, once they were given.”

• Surjit Singh, a sixteen-year-old Dalit boy from rural India, has been beaten to death for dedicating a love poem to an upper-caste girl.

• In an attempt to recover hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of fines and overdue materials, the library system in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, has hired a collection agency.

• “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society,” a novel completed by Annie Barrows after her aunt died, leaving an unfinished manuscript, has become a surprise bestseller.

I confess, I’m not so up to date on contemporary visual culture. I don’t read manga, I can’t name the most influential graphic novels, and I haven’t played a video game since the long winter when, instead of writing our senior papers, my high school boyfriend and I played “Mortal Kombat” until our eyes bled. Therefore, ”Krazy!: The Delirious World of Anime + Comics + Video Games + Art” was precisely the book I needed.

Disappointing things first: the introduction is weighed down by theory. Who comes to a book like this to read about French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy and “inoperative communities”? But the good outweighs the bad: the sections are accessibly curated (the book is the catalogue accompanying an exhibit at the Vancouver Art gallery) by experts in their fields, including Seth, Art Spiegelman, and Will Wright. In particular, I’ve become transfixed by Lotte Reiniger, a little-known German artist whose work with silhouettes and intricate paper cutouts (a single figure can have as many as fifty separate pieces, joined together with fine lead wire) were the subjects of some of the first animated stories. Tim Johnson writes, in “Krazy!,” “Although there may have been a couple of earlier animated films that were more than sixty minutes in length, I don’t think it’s unfair to say that Reiniger’s “Prince Achmed” is the first feature-length animated story.” Below: Reiniger’s “The Little Chimney Sweep,” from 1954.—Andrea Walker

In this week’s issue, Jill Lepore writes about the battle over E. B. White’s “Stuart Little.” She also discusses “Stuart Little” with Roger Angell, White’s stepson and an editor at this magazine, on the New Yorker Out Loud podcast. We asked Lepore to tell us how she researched the article.

Why would anyone want to ban “Stuart Little,” a sweet, wistful, very funny book about a kind and clever mouse? The scant published accounts of the controversy surrounding Anne Carroll Moore and E. B. White rely almost invariably on a handful of sources written decades after the events they describe. An essay White wrote for the New York Times in 1966; another written by his editor, Ursula Nordstrom, in 1974. A few pages in “The Letters of E. B. White,” edited for publication in 1976. Not much more. This irked me. These sources, on their own, raise more questions than they answer. “Stuart Little” appeared in 1945. Didn’t anyone say anything about all this then? Worst of all, the letter Moore sent to the Whites on June 20, 1945, urging White not to publish the book, had disappeared. What the deuce did it say? I decided to look for the letter.

One thing became quickly clear: I wasn’t the first person to look. In 1972, Moore’s successor at the New York Public Library, Frances Clarke Sayers, sent White her transcription of Moore’s copy of the letter—she planned to reproduce it in her forthcoming biography of Moore. White and his wife, Katharine, read it and agreed: it was very fishy. E. B. White offered to look for the original—or originals, since Katharine White remembered two or even three letters from Moore about “Stuart Little”—but Sayers, pressed by a deadline, proceeded with publication. The Whites decided to look for the letter anyway. E. B. White had been shipping his papers off to his alma mater, Cornell; he asked the archivists in Ithaca to search, to no avail. At home, he and his wife trudged to the attic where they emptied box after box, rifling through old papers. When Sayers's biography of Moore came out, Katharine White was more than miffed, but, without the letter, there was nothing she or her husband could do. She wrote to her friend Louise Seaman Bechtel, “I am sure it was dumped in the wastebasket and burned up because Andy often dumps things that displease him and so do I.”

Or maybe it was somewhere else. With the help of unfailingly generous librarians and archivists, I looked and looked. The Anne Carroll Moore Papers (pdf) at the New York Public Library are fairly extensive—librarians are good at saving stuff—but Moore either didn’t file her copy with her papers or it had since been lost. Cornell, whose E. B. White Collection contains a treasure trove of letters to White written by children, had several letters from Moore, but not this one. The Katharine Sergeant White Papers, at Bryn Mawr, confirmed what I had begun to suspect, that the real battle was between Anne Caroll Moore and Katharine White. They contain a tantalizing letter to her from Bechtel, written in June, 1974:

You may remember you wrote me at length the horrid details at a time when I thought I could make public use of them. Thank God that is no longer on my conscience. But, my White file will preserve your version of the story for posterity. If only old A. C. M. were here to read it.

Good God, where was this “White file”? Bechtel, a former children’s-book editor, sent one set of her papers to the University of Florida; the bulk of her correspondence went to Vassar. The missing letter is in neither collection. But, if Bechtel didn’t have that particular letter, she had, in fact, preserved the Whites’ story for posterity.

But...the letter. Maybe Sayers, who presumably found Moore’s copy at the New York Public Library, held onto the letter. That did not, at first, appear to be the case. And then, miraculously, an altogether intrepid archivist at UCLA, where the Frances Clarke Sayers Papers are deposited, found it: not the original, but a copy, in Moore’s handwriting, of the letter she wrote on June 20, 1945. (It had been misfiled.) The Whites were right. It is an incomplete copy, and suspiciously so.

By now, of course, that one letter mattered less than nearly everything else I found while I was looking for it. But the quest reminded me of something about which even the Whites and Anne Carroll Moore agreed: there are few things under the sun finer than a library.—Jill Lepore

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary has finally found space for the word “mondegreen,” which it defines as “a word or phrase that results from a mishearing of something said or sung.” As Hendrik Hertzberg discovered not long ago, recent advances in Internet technology have made possible a sophisticated new variety of international mondegreen. But simple, everyday mondegreens are all around us. Sometimes it seems as though conversations with my girlfriend consist entirely of mondegreens. Just yesterday, I said to her, “I kind of like it.” “You’ve got a blanket?” she said, alarmed. “Why do you have a blanket?”

The word was introduced by Sylvia Wright in a 1954 Harper’s article, “The Death of Lady Mondegreen.” In it, she warns, “If you lay yourself open to mondegreens, you must be valiant. The world, blowing near, will assail you with a thousand bright and strange images.” Wright even started reading mondegreens:

The other day I found, on the back page of the New York Post, a headline: “Giants Struggle Under the Weight of ‘Dead’ Bats.” This is one of the most terrifying scenes I can think of, particularly since there is some doubt as to whether the bats are really dead.

In honor of its new entry, Merriam-Webster has put out a request for favorite mondegreens.—Rollo Romig

• The Prime Minister of Great Britain, Gordon Brown, thinks he’s got a lot in common with Heathcliff (yes, the stormy Romantic hero of “Wuthering Heights”).

• To promote the U.K.’s National Year of Reading 2008, ITV is producing “Bookaboo!,” a live-action and animation series featuring a rock-star puppy who can’t perform his drum solo until he’s been read a story.

• Amazon reports that Kindle e-books now account for twelve per cent of sales of titles that have Kindle editions, but critics wonder how the company came up with the number.
  

• Salman Rushdie, whose 1981 novel “Midnight’s Children” won the Best of the Booker yesterday, muses on the fatwa levied against him in 1988: “In general, writers shouldn’t be killed for what they write, though I can think of exceptions.”

• Control of the rights to more than a hundred and thirty books by the late science-fiction writer Andre Norton is being disputed in court.

• A study by scientists in Toronto finds that avid readers possess excellent social skills.

Someone here just got rid of the galleys of “The Fundamentals: 8 Plays for Winning the Games of Business and Life,” by Isiah Thomas. This inspirational guide was published by HarperBusiness in 2001, the year that the Continental Basketball Association, then owned by Thomas, went bankrupt.—Blake Eskin

Last week, the magazine published the poem “Songs of a Season,” by Maureen N. McLane. In a recent conversation, the poet ruminated on writing, bleeding hearts, and pigs’ ears.

Your first collection of poems, “Same Life,” is due out in September. When and why did you start writing poetry?

I’ve always written poetry; I think the subarticulate reasons involved a desire to make things, to make a space for self-exploration and basic articulation, to formalize thought and feeling, and to experiment in sound and sense. More profoundly, I responded to a number of poems as powerful blows to the ear and mind—Robert Frost’s “Design,” Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill,” John Donne’s “Batter My Heart,” Whitman’s “Song of Myself”—and I wanted to recapture that, explore that, perhaps possess and generate that force.

Does the title of your poem refer to any particular kind of song?

I wouldn’t say I associate a particular kind of song with this poem; I think more broadly of some forms lurking behind the movements of the poem—haiku, some Greek fragments, ballad stanzas.

The poem, though quite playful, contains violent images. I’m thinking of “for the bleeding heart the ruby throat” or “with my swizzle stick/and my scissor kick.”

I was thinking of the plant bleeding heart (dicentra), but it’s interesting you point to that: in another poem, I talk about a hummingbird probing “the bleeding heart’s heart,” so, clearly, the name bears its own symbolic violence and vulnerability, even if you think of it as in the first instance a plant name.

In the poem, you mention several Szechuan delicacies. What do pigs’ ears taste like?

Oy! I don’t know! My dining companions ordered them; I stayed clear, I must admit. I’m not an omnivore. I can, however, vouch for the doughnuts dunked in soy milk: excellent. But I don’t suppose that’s terribly adventurous eating.

—Jenna Krajeski

• A bidding war has broken out over a trove of Franz Kafka’s personal documents and other personal belongings hoarded for the past forty years by an employee of Kafka’s executor.

• The costs of publishing books in China are soaring, due largely to stronger workers’ rights laws, high energy costs, and continued currency inflation.

• Authors and publishers in Australia have banded together to protest the proposed lifting of restrictions on imports of books also published in the country.

• Henrietta Rose-Innes has won the Caine Prize for African Writing for her story “Poison,” a tale of ecological disaster set in Cape Town.

• Karuta, a centuries-old Japanese poetry game involving identifying segments of short poems, or tanka, is gaining popularity in China.

• The current high bid on eBay for a copy of “All the Sad Young Literary Men” from which all the references to Harvard have been scratched out by the author, Keith Gessen: $232.50.

• Among the hundred new entries in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary: edamame, pescatarian, and mondegreen.

In this week’s London Review of Books, Terry Castle writes about the overlooked works of Maude Hutchins, a woman who, I was dismayed to learn, doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page, and who seems to have been left out of her more famous husband’s entry. Pictured here with spouse Robert Maynard Hutchins, who served as President of the University of Chicago for more than two decades, Maude is best known for her novel “Victorine,” which the New York Review of Books Classics series is reissuing in August. The catalogue copy says it all: “Hutchins had one theme—sex—which she explored with an extravagant, needling, disconcerting genius.” The novel, about a twelve-year-old upper-middle-class New England girl on the “visionary” cusp of puberty (Castle’s word), sounds ultimately less interesting than the unwritten biography of Maude, who has probably been given a slanted portrayal in the respectful biographies of her husband. Castle writes:

She had no interest in the “parochial stuffiness” of academia, one says, and refused to entertain university dignitaries. Whenever “poor Bob” had to attend a presidential function, another says, Maude would throw a “window-rattling tantrum” and threaten to “blow the roof off.” She was “extravagant”, “selfish” and “constitutionally uninterested in most of mankind.” She doted on her Great Dane, Hamlet, but “never” took her own young children out for a walk. (She and Hutchins had three daughters and it’s true: they were mostly shunted off to nannies.) She invited undergraduates, male and female, to model for her in the nude. One of her most embarrassing freaks—or so the story goes—was to send Christmas cards to all the Chicago faculty and trustees featuring a drawing of the Hutchinses’ 14-year-old daughter Franja, nude and in an alarmingly suggestive pose.

I bet she was a fun woman to have a drink with.—Andrea Walker

“My poems are so stupid,” Mao Zedong told his biographer, Robert Payne, in 1946. “You mustn’t take them seriously.” Despite the future Chairman’s protestations, a new edition of Mao’s verse has just been released, and by most accounts, his work has much more literary merit than either Stalin’s love poems or Saddam Hussein’s romance novels. Mao was an obsessive versifier and calligrapher. According to Payne, he “was always writing poems during boring party meetings, and when he had finished, he would simply toss them on the floor.”

Richard Nixon may have called Adlai Stevenson an “egghead,” but when the President needed to prepare for his 1972 visit to China, he hit the books. Nixon especially admired the fictionalized philosophical dialogues with Mao in André Malraux’s “Anti-Memoirs,” and invited Malraux to the White House for dinner and advice. When Nixon made the trip, he carried a volume of Mao’s poems with him, committed a few lines to memory, and recited them to Mao when they met. According to Nixon’s memoirs, Mao responded with more self-deprecation, saying, “I think that, generally speaking, people like me sound like a lot of big cannons.”

But Nixon wasn’t the only one who had read ahead. As the Americans left the meeting, Mao stopped Nixon in the hallway. “Your book, ‘Six Crises,’ is not a bad book,” he said.—Rollo Romig