California Literary Review

50 greatest villains in literature: These are the best of the worst: bloodsuckers, pederasts, cannibals, Old Etonians…the dastardliest dastards ever to have lashed damsel to track and waited for a through train. [Telegraph]

Is e-literature just one big anti-climax?: A year later, Mark Amerika’s Grammatron transcended the fledgling genre by turning it into a multimedia extravaganza. This, I believe, was a crucial turning point. The brief alliance between literati and digerati was severed: groundbreaking electronic fiction would now be subsumed into the art world or relegated to the academic margins. [Guardian]

James Crumley, Crime Novelist, Is Dead at 68: James Crumley, a critically acclaimed crime novelist whose drug-infused, alcohol-soaked, profanity-laced, breathtakingly violent books swept the hard-boiled detective from the Raymond Chandler era into an amoral, utterly dissolute, apocalyptic post-Vietnam universe, died on Wednesday in Missoula, Mont. He was 68 and lived in Missoula. [NYT]

Tom Wolfe Isn’t Worried: Tom Wolfe, 77, still has his white suits, white cars and his spiny, italicized, hyper-exclamatory words for certain dum-dum second-raters (like investment bankers). [Observer]

Odd couple’s book of letters gets French literary world buzzing: After months of speculation, the duo was revealed yesterday as Michel Houellebecq, France’s award-winning enfant terrible, and Benard-Henri Lévy, the dapper, leftwing philosopher. The odd couple, who embody France’s love-hate relationship with its celebrity writers, have produced a book of letters to each other in which they lay themselves bare, about their reputations, politics, loves and parents – key for Houellebecq after his mother recently published a memoir calling him a sex-crazed idiot and manipulative fake. [Guardian]