Good thing that whole eBay auction ploy worked out! Yeah, so I'm a few months late on this post, but... after devouring the first couple hundred pages of Chris Adrian's The Children's Hospital, I've decided that reading it is pretty much all I want to do until I'm done. Nina knew what was up back in March

The New Yorker was destined to have a books podcast at some point. The Dating Game is the first edition, featuring a discussion between Edwidge Danticat and fiction editor, Deborah Treisman. They chat about Junot Díaz’s 1995 short story “How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie)" from his collection Drown

Having taken meticulous notes and planned the novel during his cross-country travels, JACK KEROUAC wrote the first draft of On the Road in a three-week burst of creativity, taping sheets of paper together so they could run through his typewriter uninterrupted. After a cross-country exhibition tour, the original scroll has returned to Lowell’s Boott Cotton Mills Museum, where its display will be part of "ON THE ROAD IN LOWELL,” a festival of readings, musical performances, and art exhibits (see www.

TREVOR CORSON has a thing for sea life. His first book, The Secret Life of Lobsters, began as an essay in The Best American Science Writing. Now, he’s turning his attention from Maine crustaceans to “the fast food of Old Tokyo” with The Zen of Fish (click for an excerpt). Corson, a reporter and magazine editor who’s fluent in Japanese, presents the cultural history and science behind sushi through the eyes of Kate Murray and her fellow students at the California Sushi Academy.

The lit buzz circulating around Brookline native RISHI REDDI reminds us of the hype that surrounded Jhumpa Lahiri back when The Interpreter of Maladies — a collection she began writing at Boston University’s Creative Writing program that went on to win the Pulitzer in 2000 — was published. Like Lahiri, Reddi uses her Indian background as a cultural setting.

We first became enthralled by Audacia Ray’s new book because it boasted a cover with numerical code arranged in the form of an ass. Bloody brilliant, if you ask us. Of course, the inside worked for us as well. Naked on the Internet: Hookups, Downloads and Cashing In on Internet Sexploration is a seriously painstaking peek into the way that women have/are using the internet to explore their sexuality and in some instances getting paid to do so.

We first became enthralled by Audacia Ray’s new book because it boasted a cover with numerical code arranged in the form of an ass. Bloody brilliant, if you ask us. Of course, the inside worked for us as well. Naked on the Internet: Hookups, Downloads and Cashing In on Internet Sexploration is a seriously painstaking peek into the way that women have/are using the internet to explore their sexuality and in some instances getting paid to do so.

Dear Oprah,

Please stop it.

Now when I recommed Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex to people as one of my favorite coming-of-age novels of all time, they're going to be like, Gag, wasn't that shit on Oprah? Soon you'll put your Oprah Seal of Approval on all the new book pressings. I'll walk into the bookstore and I'll see it.

Brookline Booksmith hosts a double bill with both ANDREW O’HAGAN and CLAIRE MESSUD reading from their fourth novels. The Scottish-born O’Hagan’s Be Near Me is narrated by David Anderton, an Oxford-educated Catholic priest who obtains a parish near his elderly mother in working-class Scotland. His “posh” behavior and cultural tastes alienate his parishioners, and then there’s his relationship with a young boy.

We can't stop OMG-ing over these amazing graphic renderings of what will soon become The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Ok, so it'll be built in lame muggy Orlando as opposed to the moors of Britain, which sucks, but whatever. We're sure J.K. Rowling can invest her bajillions in some kind of park-wide fog/mist machine. Anyway.