Tear yourself away from CNN

The Washington Post's Jonathan Yardley did a look back at Flannery O'Connor today. The author quotes O'Connor's words in which she compared her self to fellow Catholic novelist Graham Greene:

If Greene created an old lady, she would be sour through and through and if you dropped her, she would break, but if you dropped my old lady, she'd bounce back at you, screaming 'Jesus loves me!' I think the basis of the way I see is comic regardless of what I do with it; Greene's is something else.

The L.A. Times did a profile of Reza Aslan, author of No god But God (sic), an examination of Islam and the possibilities of reform. (The link to the Aslan profile courtesy Moorish Girl.)

The NY Times does a story on how more than one book winds up using the same stock photo -- or other similar design -- on its cover. Everyone involved professes embarrassment. I see it as a niche business opportunity, a sort of publishing due diligence: before a book cover design is finalized, validate its originality by submitting it to a firm whose whole business is to watch out for such things.

Speaking of publishing, a woman who posed as, variously, a publisher and a literary agent, is under federal indictment for bilking hopeful writers. The suspect went so far as to claim one of her false identities had been killed in the World Trade Center in 2001. But she's not the only one; the story says there's a website called Writer Beware that lists 400 "questionable" literary agents and 200 such publishers.

Flannery O'Connor, Jonathan Yardley, Reza Aslan, Moorish Girl