California Literary Review

Porn claims outrage German Kafka scholars: The German-speaking world of Kafka scholars hit out yesterday over a British academic’s claims that the writer had a penchant for hard porn. [Guardian]

Dylan’s Poetic Pause in Hollywood on the Way to Folk Music Fame: Barry Feinstein, the rock ’n’ roll photographer, was digging through his archives last year when he came across a long-forgotten bundle of pictures, dozens of dark, moody snapshots of Hollywood in the early 1960s. And tucked next to the photographs was a set of prose poems, written around the same time by an old friend: Bob Dylan. [NYT]

I love you, Lord Byron: How the poet’s postbag bulged with female admirers’ letters: Lord Byron, the Romantic poet, was one of the first celebrities to receive a deluge of fan mail from anonymous women whose amorous epistles he treasured, research has revealed. [Independent]

WAGs and war on terror invade dictionary: WAGs, carbon footprints and the credit crunch are now so much a part of everyday life that they are being included in the Chambers Dictionary. New words included in the 11th edition of the book, out on August 22, have a strong green focus, with food miles, green tax, eco-village and electrosmog – the potentially harmful electromagnetic fields from computers and mobile phones – also making it into the dictionary for the first time. [Guardian]

Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’ comes to the screen: Screenwriter Joe Penhall’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s bestselling novel opens with the two survivors of some unspoken earthly catastrophe enduring an earthquake, witnessing a forest fire, stepping around a severed human leg and discovering a family of three who have hanged themselves — all before Page 8. [LA Times]

Book Of A Lifetime: The Barracks, by John McGahern: Although I still have that first copy of the book, I can’t tell whether I brought it out from Ireland or if I picked it up somewhere along the way. What I do know is that I first read John McGahern’s The Barracks as a student in the early 1980s, when I was travelling through Europe for the summer. [Independent]