Tipped off by a Facebook post by literary scene fixture Miss Sara Rosen, we just discovered the most amazing treasure trove of handcrafted, miniature versions of some of our favorite writers of all time over on Etsy — and they’re all available for purchase. Just think, you can make a tiny Kurt Vonnegut chat up a pint-sized Flannery O’Connor! Joyce Carol Oates can have a deep conversation about heartbreak with Sylvia Plath! JRR Tolkien and Isaac Asimov can arm wrestle to determine who is more popular! The possibilities are endless.

via Flavorwire » Gallery: Famous Writers as Handcrafted Dolls.

OMG. I’d like the Harper Lee. Or the Dorothy Parker. Or the Joyce Carol Oates. Or. . .

Pierce Brosnan is set to star in the miniseries adaptation of Stephen King’s 1998 bestseller, Bag of Bones. The James Bond actor will return to television for the four-hour, two-night Sony Pictures Television event on A&E. Kelly Rowland and Annabeth Gish (as Jo) will also join the cast of this supernatural thriller.

Bag of Bones introduces readers to novelist Mike Noonan. After Noonan’s wife dies suddenly, he finds himself unable to write. Fortunately, in previous years he had written prolifically, and he now has 4 earlier manuscripts stashed away. One by one he doles these out for his annual best seller. But once the manuscripts are gone, Noonan is still unable to produce anything new. Moreover, he has begun having nightmares about a summer home from his past. Thinking that the dreams must hold some meaning for him, he returns to the house to face his fears.

Stieg’s Stockholm

A couple of weekends ago my husband and I plowed through all three Swedish film versions of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy. We had seen each one separately before, but it was fun seeing them in order, one right after the other. During one scene when Blomqvist was walking through a busy intersection, I thought, “I bet at least one company is offering Stieg Larsson tours of Stockholm.”

In this article in the Paris Review Daily Elisabeth Donnelly describes that very thing, a tour she and her father took on a recent trip to Stockholm. I was especially interested to learn that Lisbeth Salander’s 25-room penthouse actually exists, although Donnelly and her father didn’t actually get inside. Donnelly also offers some interesting facts about Larsson’s life that I didn’t know, such as this:

Larsson also wrote science fiction, was an accomplished illustrator, and traveled to Africa the year after he finished his mandatory Swedish military service to teach female guerrilla fighters in Eritrea how to handle arms. The trip to Eritrea shaped the theme of female warriors in the third book, The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest.

 Death & Authors: The 12 Weirdest Stories

No additional commentary needed.

 Missouri School District Bans ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ and ‘Twenty Boy Summer’

The school board in Republic, Mo., voted 4-0 to eliminate Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five” and Sarah Ockler’s “Twenty Boy Summer” from the high school curriculum and library, respectively, after a local man led an effort to deem the novels inappropriate.

It’s not just the censorship that bothers me, it’s the arrogant ignorance:

Of the members of the school board who voted on the issue last Monday, according to UPI, only one — Melissa Duvall — had actually read either of the books in question.

E-books Rapidly Increasing in Reading Groups

 Reading group members nationwide are increasingly choosing e-books and e-readers over traditional print books, according to a survey by Reading Group Choices (RGC). The survey shows that 25% of reading group members are using e-books, up 10 percentage points from 2009.

More facts from the report: Most people (59%) reading ebooks are using Amazon’s Kindle, with Barnes & Noble’s Nook in second place (26%).  “The Nook is rapidly catching up, however—up from just 7% in 2009. Usage of tablet computers as e-readers is also on the rise.” But overall, the majority of readers still prefer printed books over ebooks. “Currently, romance fiction is the genre most frequently read in e-book format (60% of all titles purchased in e-book format.)”

The best 100 closing lines from books

There’s also a link to the best 100 opening lines.

Britain’s Telegraph ordered to pay $100,000 over book review

The Daily Telegraph’s parent company was ordered Tuesday to pay more than $100,000 in damages over a book review. The British newspaper lost a lawsuit for libel and malicious falsehood in the high court.

This initially looks like scary stuff, but it’s not so alarming once you read the whole story.

Here’s something to keep your group busy over the long holiday weekend.

If you’re still in need of some last-minute gifts for the bibliophiles on your list, the Christian Science Monitor offers a few possibilities. (Note to Santa: My favorite is the jewelry made with tiles depicting the covers of commonly banned books.)

And an added feature of this article is that the introduction contains links to the Monitor‘s lists of recommended fiction, nonfiction, and children’s books.

Novelists and screenwriters know that time travel can be accomplished in all sorts of ways: a supercharged DeLorean, Hermione’s small watch and, most recently, a spacetime-bending hot tub have allowed fictional heroes to jump between past and future.

But physicists know that time travel is more than just a compelling plot device — it’s a serious prediction of Einstein’s general relativity equations. In a new study posted online July 15, researchers led by Seth Lloyd at MIT analyze how some of the quirks and peculiarities of real-life time travel might play out. This particular kind of time travel evades some of its most paradoxical predictions, Lloyd says.

Any theory of time travel has to confront the devastating ‘grandfather paradox,’ in which a traveler jumps back in time and kills his grandfather, which prevents his own existence, which then prevents the murder in the first place, and so on.

I certainly don’t have the physics background to understand the scientific concept of time travel, but I’ve always found the possibility to be a fascinating literary device. Here’s a bit of the scientific perspective.

The question mark that accompanies the subtitle of author Padgett Powell’s new book, The Interrogative Mood: A Novel? might seem flippant. But Powell’s book earns that bit of punctuation. The Interrogative Mood is composed entirely of questions. Some of them are laugh out loud funny, some designed to provoke memories of long gone times, some leave you pondering the meaning of life. But is it really a novel?

Just in time for Halloween, NPR presents this list of three formidably haunted houses: “In some novels, the house is as much a force as any of the people in the story. When that happens, the human characters had better beware.”

Please, spare us any more giant mammal jokes! Here in Massachusetts we’ve had to listen to every possible commentator refer to it as a ‘whale of a debate,’ but, after a lively discussion in our state House of Representatives we are now a step closer to having a new ‘official state epic novel.’

That would be ‘Moby Dick‘, Herman Melville’s 1851 classic.

The original request, made by the state representative from Pittsfield, where Moby-Dick was written, was for the novel to become the official state book. But that proposal met with opposition by the representative from Concord, home of Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Louisa May Alcott.

Personally, I’m more concerned about the defending World Series champion Red Sox, who are now down 3 games to 1 in a best-of-seven series to determine who plays in this year’s World Series.

‘State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America’ is an intriguing collection of essays and snapshots on the 50 states as seen through the eyes of 50 writers.

In a modern update of the series referred to in the previous post, Jeffrey Burke reviews the book State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America, edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey.

Weiland’s preface helpfully defines the intent: “a road trip in book form,” written by “our finest novelists and reporters.” Wilsey then goes on for 13 pages about a road trip he made in 2002 and makes no attempt to connect explicitly to the book’s mission. It’s a perfect warmup for the motley assemblage that follows.

Burke passes out several awards in the process of highlighting the eccentricities in this book–all of which make the book look like one well worth reading.

And so, asks David Kelly on the New York Times book blog, what’s the funniest novel ever?

Here are some of the books nominated by the editors of the Times’s Book Review:

• “Lucky Jim” (which got the most votes),
• David Lodge’s “Small World”
• “The Code of the Woosters”
• “Leave It to Psmith”
• “Bech: A Book”
• “Sabbath’s Theater”
• Carl Hiaasen’s novels
• Jim Harrison’s early novels (“Warlock,” “A Good Day to Die”)
• Richard Russo’s “Straight Man”
• Michael Chabon’s “Wonder Boys”
• “Catch-22″
• “Candy”

Of course, Kelly points one, we must differentiate between “the greatest comic novel (“Don Quixote”? “Tristram Shandy”? “Ulysses”?) and the novel you find the funniest.” He adds that, while “A Confederacy of Dunces” isn’t great literature, Ignatius J. Reilly cracks him up.

So, what’s the funniest novel you’ve ever read? Post a comment here.