— Not only is she now a Nobel Prize winner, Doris Lessing is also on MySpace. But how about Facebook? She’d probably be really good at Scrabulous. (via)

— Coming soon (on Tuesday, to be exact): Dictionary Day. Before today, I never knew such a day existed, but I’m glad it does. I can entertain myself for hours following words through a dictionary.

— You have to read through (or scroll past) a couple other items to get to this one (though you might be interested in learning about the next Star Trek movie), but Philip K. Dick’s work has been acquired by a production company.

— Richard Ford: ordinary dude.

— Was Shakespeare actually Shakespeare? Nobody knows, but people sure like discussing it. My take on the issue is that it doesn’t actually matter if he was, as traditionally believed, the fellow from Stratford or, as it’s cool to think at present, the Earl of Oxford, because the important part is the writing that exists. Here’s a little something about the literary debate that will never go away.

— The National Book Critics Circle blog has a dispatch from the Frankfurt Book Fair.

— Susan Faludi, whose Backlash is a feminist studies must-read, has written a book, The Terrorist Dream, about, well, the post-9/11 backlash. And then there’s some stuff about Bruce Springsteen’s album Magic. I get the connection that writer Rebecca Traister makes between the two works, but it’s a weird article, I guess because it sort of seems like “Oh, by the way, Springsteen is pissed, too.”

— Here’s a review of a new biography, Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life.

— The article asks, Are sacred texts sacred? And it seems to argue that regardless of divine authorship (or inspiration), they are indeed sacred to believers, so atheists might as well let people have their beliefs if they want them, as long as they’re not using those beliefs to do harm. Related, if only because the article quotes him a bit: Christopher Hitchens is a National Book Award finalist.

— Edmund Wilson finally makes it into the Library of America.