California Literary Review

Book Of A Lifetime: Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer, By George Bourne: Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer is by George Bourne – a pseudonym for George Sturt, who ran a wheelwright’s shop in Farnham in the 1900s. The labourer of the title is a man called Bettesworth who was George Bourne’s gardener; the book is really just a collection of sketches of Bettesworth’s life and a record of his sayings. [Independent]

Audrey Niffenegger Receives $5 Million Advance for Second Novel: Six years after the publication of her blockbuster best-selling novel, “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” Audrey Niffenegger has sold a new manuscript for close to $5 million, according to people with knowledge of the negotiations. [NYT]

A Story of a Teenager’s Suicide Quietly Becomes a Best Seller: Each tape reveals an anecdote about another classmate whose actions the girl blames for her death. [NYT]

Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged climbs up charts during recession: Atlas Shrugged, the literary classic which promotes individual enterprise above all else during tough economic times, has catapulted up the charts since the recession. [Telegraph]

New evidence of Poe’s mint julep shame: It was the bourbon that did it, or so a newly available excuse note claims. A 1842 letter from Edgar Allan Poe to his publishers apologises for his drunken behaviour while in New York, blaming his friend, the poet and lawyer William Ross Wallace, for pouring too many juleps down his throat, and begs them to buy an article he has written as he is “desperately pushed for money”. [Guardian]