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After his mother died, Nicholas Vargas stopped bothering. (I want to know that Nicholas is going to be okay.)

Sometimes
I can still feel my right hand,
like a best friend;
weighted,
warm. (Ooh. Intrigues me and makes me care about the main character, all at once.)

Micah’s breath scraped in and out of his lungs; his feet were clodded with road-mud. (I like the feel of this sentence, and I like that it uses a semicolon. How many times have you found a semicolon in a first sentence?)

Three blind and tail-less mice catapulted through the cat door, skidded over the linoleum kitchen floor, and collapsed in a furry heap at Julie's feet. (I can already tell that fairy tale adventures will ensue.)

Freddie Rooke gazed coldly at the breakfast-table. (The tone of this sentence is the tone of the entire book. I can almost tell who the author is just by the familiarity of this line.)

What happens when your non-fiction subject turns out to be a much different person than you expected?

The NY Times City Room blog has an essay about Joseph Mitchell's awe-inspiring book of literary journalism, Joe Gould's Secret. Read the book. You will thank me. That's all I have to say.

If that's not enough kooky literary characters for you, read about this Cape Cod novelist who wrote an entire fake transcript of his hoax visit to Oprah's book club. The transcript is one of the craziest pieces of fiction I read all week. (Thanks, GalleyCat)

Finally, the San Francisco Bay Guardian Online delivers an insightful essay about Tao Lin, featuring some interesting thoughts about the first generation of novelists weaned on the Internet.

Publishing Spotted collects the best of what's around on writing blogs on any given day. Feel free to send tips and suggestions to your fearless editor: jason [at] thepublishingspot.com.

I love reading about imaginary books inside of books, imaginary movies inside of books, and any other kind of imaginary text hiding inside a real book. These twisty bits of metafiction make a literary world more textured and mysterious.

The public radio show, To The Best of Our Knowledge, has an entire episode dedicated to metafiction, including interviews with Jorge Luis Borges and Robert Coover--two keystones of my bookshelf. (Thanks, Now What!) 

If metafiction isn't your cup of tea, then try something shorter--flash fiction. Five Easy Questions graduate Jeff VanderMeer has a piece in an Amnesty International-sponsored compilation of short short fiction. Check his sample, then dig the book here.

Finally, Barrett Hathcock has a guest essay up at Conversational Reading about the chronological order of Philip Roth's career. It's worth it for this quote alone, a new way of thinking about your favorite writers:

"I for one hold a special fondness for the chronological listing; it’s like seeing the geological strata in a roadcut in some mountain pass."

What if we are just a scrap of metafiction inside somebody's history book?  

Digital-era journalist extraordinaire John Tierney just published an essay that will undoubtedly float a million new science fiction stories and their hack movie versions.

He talks to a couple scientists who are floating a new twist on the "brain in a vat" theory of human consciousness, guessing that we are really living inside a super-advanced, futrististic computer program that future people are using to recreate or study the past. Run, don't walk, over to the New York Times to read all about it.

I know, I know, we've all heard these ideas before, but these playful theories are like jumping-jacks for your writing muscles. Go ahead and dream up a couple ways to impress these future historians with your own story.

Check out his blog post for hundreds of comments from readers about this mind-bender: 

"Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University ... concludes: 'If you might be living in a simulation then all else equal you should care less about others, live more for today, make your world look more likely to become rich, expect to and try more to participate in pivotal events, be more entertaining and praiseworthy, and keep the famous people around you happier and more interested in you.'"

(Thanks, SF Signal!) 

What if we were all just characters in somebody else's novel, dude? 

A post over at GalleyCat reports on two new web projects that extend novels into the real world, building websites for fictional characters from books. Check out the fake band Metal Assassin, created for Mark Haskell Smith's novel Salty. Then read the New York Daily Herald, a fake newspaper designed for Nicholas Kulish's novel, Last One In.

Have you written about international literature recently? If you think you have what it takes, the action-packed site, Words Without Borders is looking for a new blogger.

Two great, haunted novelists read together in New York this week. In a single sentence, Maud Newton links to all the best articles about the event. I have nothing to add: "Günther Grass & Norman Mailer discussed Nazi ties and U.S. presidential hopefuls at the NYPL earlier this week. (Via & via.)"

Publishing Spotted collects the best of what's around on writing blogs on any given day. Feel free to send tips and suggestions to your fearless editor: jason [at] thepublishingspot.com.