I didn't find out that Joe Hill is giving a reading at the South Portland Borders until after my review of his 20th Century Ghosts ran in the Phoenix a couple weeks ago. So I used the news as an excuse to provide you all with more coverage of this smart author. This afternoon, I did a short phone interview with Hill, who lives near Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Congratulations to Bostonian Sue Miller, this year's winner of the Kate Chopin Award, bestowed each year to an author who embraces the feminist themes of Chopin's best-known work, The Awakening.

When I wrote about Miller's 2008 novel, The Senator's Wife, in January, I spoke to her about the complicated feminism of one of the book's two main female characters, Delia.

Nina wrote this piece about Kelly Link's new book of short (YA?!) fiction, Pretty Monsters. (NMac's written about Link's stories before.)

I wrote this about Joe Hill's not-so-new book of short fiction, 20th Century Ghosts.

Both writers combine "real-life horrors...with others less real," as Nina puts it. Both are worth reading.

Organizer and businessman Michael Ansara had been clandestinely writing poetry for years when his friend (and former congressman, but not the guitar player) Chet Atkins encouraged him to start the Massachusetts Poetry Outrach Project, aimed at bringing poetry back into the mainstream (or at least out of the back of the bookstore).

In this week's Portland Phoenix, I write about Abortion and Life, a new book by feminist author Jennifer Baumgardner. In the book, Baumgardner suggests that by ignoring or simplifying the emotional nuance of a decision to terminiate a pregnancy, we do a disservice, both the women who make that choice, as well as to the movement that protects our right to do so.

Two days after Jon Papernick told me that "I'm not certain that literature plays any role in the evolution or resolution of international conflicts" (a statement with which I largely agree, though I also concur with his assessment that "literature can hold a mirror up to the world and reflect it back in a more human and less biased way than one might see pictured in the media"), I get an email about the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, which will be bestowed this Sunday in Dayton, Ohio.

This Thursday, in Newton Centre, the Jewish books Web site JBooks will team up with JVibe, a magazine for Jewish teens, to present Get Lit 2008, a literary event in Newton Centre. The event, which will take place at the Union Street Restaurant and bar, will feature conversations with several Massachusetts-based authors, including Jon Papernick, the current writer-in-residence at Emerson College.

Alright. So I was about to write a long post about using literature as a romantic litmus test, pegged to a press release I received earlier this week about the launch of the UK's Penguin Dating, powered by match.com. More on that later, perhaps.

But I took a break to wander up to the Portland Public Library, and scored this treasure from the Free Books pile: Health and Hygiene for the Modern Woman, by Leonard H.

Even in her unbridled fantasies, happiness had been difficult to conjure. 

The Anna (Roitman) K. of Irina Reyn's new novel What Happened to Anna K. (Touchstone) is doomed from the start. Literature and movies have blurred her conception of reality. She wants Heathcliff and Darcy, romance, Dostoyevsky-esque intensity combined with fairytale endings. But she recognizes that even in her romantic imaginings, there's always a tinge of sadness, of unresolved conflict, of stormy situation. It's as though she needs to exist at the apex of every story, unable to move toward the denouement. And in this modern re-imagining of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina that takes place within New York City's Russian immigrant community, Anna's intellectual depressiveness is her fatal downfall.

The folks over at The Millions have posted their responses to the question: What was the book that started it all for you? They've encouraged lurkers to post responses either in the comments or on their own blogs; I'm taking the second route.

Blogger Edan and I have a lot in common. Here's her entry:

"According to my mother, I could read novels before I was potty trained.

Yesterday, Maureen Dowd compared Barack Obama to Jane Austen's prideful Mr. Darcy, and took the metaphor farther by claiming that we Americans are collectively his Elizabeth Bennet. Fine. Dowd also casts John McCain as Wickham, the manipulative lying cad who somehow pulls the wool over even an intelligent person's eyes.