Requiem by John Updike [NYT]
Renegade Updike: Even in advanced age, even as the victim of a debilitating disease, however, John Updike could muster a fearsome outrage. It was never in his tone of voice, which was always polite and measured. It was in his words, which he deployed like weapons. [Washington Post]
‘He took the novel onto another plane of intimacy’: Joyce himself said that certain things were too embarrassing to be written down in black and white. Updike was congenitally unembarrassable and we are the beneficiaries of that. [Guardian]
Washington Post to End Book World as Stand-Alone Section: In another sign that literary criticism is losing its profile in newspapers, The Washington Post has decided to shutter the print version of Book World, its Sunday stand-alone book review section, and shift reviews to space inside two other sections of the paper. [NYT]
Selling Grows Rougher for Small Comics Publishers: Is this the end of independent comic books? [NYT]
Gaiman wins Newbery medal for The Graveyard Book: British fantasy author Neil Gaiman has won American’s most prestigious children’s fiction prize, the Newbery medal, for his novel The Graveyard Book. [Guardian]
Johannes M. Simmel, Writer of Cold-War Novels, Dies at 84: Mr. Simmel, a chemist turned journalist, achieved enormous popularity in Germany and Austria with his heavily researched stories of cold-war intrigue and current social problems like mental illness, racism, alcoholism, environmental destruction and the drug trade. [NYT]
Toasting Robert Burns on his 250th birthday: Poetry. It’s not very fashionable. It lost its appeal before the television age. Yet today around the world, many people will be reading and listening to the poems of the world’s greatest dead poet, the Scot Robert Burns. [San Francisco Chronicle]
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