7-August-08

1. The New York Times: Mr Darcy Comes Courting by Maureen Dowd

2. Guardian blog: The literary legacy of New York punk

3. Michael Chabon talking about The Yiddish Policemen's Union on The Book Show

4. New Yorker: Personal History – All the Answers by Charles Van Doren, will make you want to hire out Quiz Show all over again

5. The New York Times: review of Doris Lessing's Alfred and Emily

6. Awesome Animal Farm cover

7. The Warwick Review

8. It is pretty astonishing that of the five shortlisted novels for the Age book of the year, two are published by Giramondo. I haven't read the Juchau or the Winton, but the Knox, the Coetzee and the London are all strong in such different ways.

9. Who'd have thought that A Fraction of the Whole would have been shortlisted – alongside another strong debut in The Low Road, which is more obviously a crime novel – for the Ned Kelly awards?

10. Salon: Why won't you blurb me?

11. This clip from Synecdoche, New York (2008) lets me know it's a film that will make me nervous the way Charlie Kaufman can, which I'm already looking forward to.

12. Podularity

13. I'm looking forward to the new Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap, due this November. It sounds quite different to his previous work: "In this remarkable novel, Tsiolkas turns his unflinching and all-seeing eye onto that which connects us all: the modern family and domestic life in the twenty-first century."

14. The Prime Minister's Literary Awards shortlisted authors are Mireille Juchau, Dorothy Porter, Malcolm Knox, Gail Jones, David Malouf, Tom Keneally and Steven Conte. Better start reading...