— A Polish author has been accused of murder because details of a killing in his novel closely resemble those in a real-life murder case.

— Look. I love Jane Austen. And I love her books because I get that they are about social issues and are not sweeping romances. Well that and because they are often funny as hell. This is why I wanted to stick a pen in my eye while watching the Keira Knightley version of Pride and Prejudice: it tried to over-romanticize the story and also managed to suck the humor out of it, and I then decided I was pretty much over Hollywood adaptations of Austen. So, it was with a sigh that I noticed that a somewhat-fictionalized Austen biopic was being released, and while watching trailers I’ve pretty much always thought something along the lines of “Oh dear.” Turns out I’m not the only one.

— Mark Sarvas on novel revising.

— The canon — or at least the dreaded high school summer reading list — is getting a more modern makeover. I don’t even want to know how someone justifies teaching a Dan Brown novel in school (note the last school on the list). That hurts my heart a little.

— Speaking of kids and reading: how to turn your kids into lifelong readers. Now, don’t get me wrong. I think reading for the sake of reading is a good thing, though I also think “frittering the time away on so-called social websites like MySpace or Facebook” isn’t horrible either. But then I guess I would think that, because I heart the internets. Sometimes.

— Did you know that it was Madame Bovary Month? Yeah, I didn’t either.

— Amiri Baraka: still ruffling feathers. With discussion of his political/ideological/personal transformations and the way they shaped his writing, and some commentary on the fallout from his 9/11 poem “Somebody Blew Up America” it’s an interesting piece.