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Muriel Spark wrote a biography of Mary Shelley, Child of Light, that’s been out of print for years. Won’t someone revive it, as an ebook at least? This fan of both novelists would like to read it.

Blake Bailey admires aspects of Tracy Daugherty’s Joseph Heller biography but “can’t help thinking wistfully of what might have been” without the pressure to finish by Catch-22′s 50th anniversary.

“If you only knew how fucking silly you look with that herring in your hand!” — Arthur Rimbaud to Paul Verlaine, from Enid Starkie’s account of the demise of their tempestuous relationship.

“I suddenly began to realize that everybody in America is a natural born thief,” wrote Jack Kerouac, who, alongside St. Augustine and Mark Twain, features in Rachel Shteir’s The Steal: A Cultural History of Shoplifting.

“All autobiographies are, in part, lies,” says Touré, who sees Manning Marable’s “more complete and unvarnished” new Malcolm X biography as a worthy supplement to The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

“There is a particular sort of toughness of mind to be found in American women writers–Flannery O’Connor and Dawn Powell had it–and its finest living avatar is now clearly Paula Fox.” — Gerald Howard, 2001

“I used to want to be like June Miller when I was a teenager, because she sounded so beautiful and so seductive and so dangerous… It’s interesting I didn’t want to be like Henry or Anaïs instead — the writers. I wanted to be like someone who never wrote anything.”

“His voice had once been so musical that when he recited passages like, ‘Before Abraham was, I am,’ it must have been nothing short of the sound of God.” Ben Cohen remembers Reynolds Price.

“One of the things reading does, it makes your loneliness manageable if you are an essentially lonely person.” — Jamaica Kincaid, who has a novel excerpt out in Little Star

The first five chapters of Kate Christensen’s forthcoming — and outstanding — The Astral are online at Scribd. (You know how I adore her, and this book is her best yet.)

A heartrending autobiographical essay about the mess Sam Lipsyte made of his life before age twenty-five has echoes in his fiction, Philip Connors says.

“I chose a very short text because I knew that I would read without stopping to breathe, thus very badly.” Amelié Nothomb keeps a culture diary, converses at PEN with Buket Uzuner.

“What once wasn’t literature is now at the heart of the canon,” Marjorie Garber argues. Christopher Beha agrees but says Garber, like those she criticizes, ultimately wants “literature” to mean only one thing.

I’m just scratching the surface of BBC Radio 4′s new program library, but it’s so much easier to find archived interviews, like A.S. Byatt on Possession, Joseph Heller on Catch-22… (Via.)

“Any young dude—and it’s always a young dude—who has a copy of [Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair] should be forced to turn it over until he reaches a responsible age.”

It’s James Salter Month at The Paris Review. Geoff Dyer, Jhumpa Lahiri, Porochista Khakpour, and other writers offer appreciations of Salter’s work in the lead-up to the magazine’s annual Spring Revel.

Maria Bustillos dips into David Foster Wallace’s archives, returns with scraps of Wallace’s unpublished writings (including correspondence with his fourth-grade teacher) and insight into his self-help reading.

According to Jill Lepore, Longfellow’s much-maligned “Paul Revere’s Ride,” published the day South Carolina seceded from the Union, “was read at the time as a call to arms, rousing northerners to action.”

The human brain’s readiness to imagine “objects with certain characteristics, such as flimsiness and movement … has always been exploited by successful literary artists.” Emma Garman on Dreaming By the Book (and other critics on neglected faves).

In Mat Johnson’s satirical Pym, a “blackademic” refuses to sit on the Diversity Committee, fails to make tenure, and winds up in Antarctica searching for the origins of a Poe character.

“MFK Fisher wrote like an angel, but there was an earthy passion and utter indulgence in her books… that entwined memories of how she lived and what she ate.” See also Recession cooking with MFK Fisher and Kate C. on Consider the Oyster.

My dearest Carrie Frye joins The Awl as managing editor. Carrie is better known in these parts as CAAF, coiner of “Nicht Kunts” and bringer of guilt whenever I’m not writing. She’s pounding out her own book on a Galaxie typewriter.

“I met him in England and he read a manuscript of mine, said this won’t do but it’s almost there.” — Harry Crews on Graham Greene, his “main-most man,” and his own ill health, and more. (Page 67 of near-unnavigable PDF.)

For the first time in forty years, The Paris Review will serialize a novel: Roberto Bolaño’s The Third Reich, illustrated by Leanne Shapton

“I never cease to be astonished by his insight, his freshness, his brevity (deep problems treated like cold baths: in and out as quickly as possible)…” Geoff Dyer praises the inexhaustible Friedrich Nietzsche.