The Russian poet Joseph Brodsky once wrote that bad literature was a form of treason. We at the Book Bench never endorse bad books, but tales of deceit and treachery? Those we can get behind. Congratulations to Scott Kanengeiser, from Broadview Heights, Ohio, who bravely beat all other entrants in this week's contest!

This week's covers: "The Last Temptation of Christ," "Treason," "Julius Caesar," and "Wolf Hall."

Last Friday, the New York Times reported that New York state officials were planning to trim the goose population in the state by about 170,000. According to the Times, the initiative arose from meetings following U.S. Airways Flight 1549, which made an emergency landing in the Hudson River after Canada geese flew into its engines. In the past ten years, there have been seventy-eight geese strikes on airplanes (or airplane strikes on geese, depending on how you look at it).

I e-mailed Michael Kalafatas, whose forthcoming book “Bird Strike: The Crash of the Boston Electra” traces the phenomenon from a deadly strike in the nineteen-sixties to the present day. Kalafatas, formerly the director of admissions at Brandeis University, kindly answered my questions on plane crashes, airborne dangers, and New York State’s plan.

Why did you write about the crash of the Boston Electra?

I wrote the book because I was fascinated with the crash and amazed that the story had never been treated at book length. Imagine: On a warm and golden afternoon, October 4, 1960, a Lockheed Electra jet turboprop carrying seventy-two souls took off from Logan airport. Seconds later, the plane slammed into a flock of 10,000 to 20,000 starlings, and abruptly plummeted into Winthrop Harbor. The collision took sixty-two lives and gave rise to the largest rescue mobilization in Boston’s history, which included civilians in addition to police, firefighters, skindivers, and Navy and Coast Guard air-sea rescue teams. Largely because of the quick action and good seamanship of Winthrop citizens, many of them boys in small boats, ten passengers survived what the Civil Aeronautics Board termed “a non-survivable crash.” At the time, although virtually surrounded by water, Logan had no water-rescue plan—their equipment sat useless at the end of the runway overlooking the harbor. The rescue and recovery mobilization exceeded even that of Boston’s 1942 Cocoanut Grove Nightclub fire, when nearly five hundred died. Three books had been written about the nightclub fire, yet none about the Electra crash.

The story had tugged at me since October 5, 1960, the day after the crash, when I was a senior at Boston English High School, and a classmate (a scuba diver) walked into class and announced he’d spent the previous evening pulling bodies out of Winthrop Harbor after a plane had crashed off Logan Airport.

What is your opinion on New York State’s plan to kill Canada geese in order to avoid further air strikes? Is this the right solution?

Air strikes are a clear-and-present danger. The reasons are many; here are just two. Thirteen of the fourteen largest birds found in North America have populations dramatically on the rise; any one of these birds is capable of shutting down a modern jet engine. Typically these birds fly in flocks—as was the case when U.S. Airways 1549 struck the flock of Canada geese. Also, in a quiet but dangerous revolution, in a generation the airlines shifted away from use of jetliners powered by three or four engines to jetliners powered by two engines. Ninety per cent of all Boeing deliveries today are twinjets. It is far easier for birds to disable a plane with two engines than one with four engines. Redundancy in jet engines raises probability that an aircraft is not left powerless after a bird strike and can make a safe emergency landing at an airport. It is noteworthy that the President of the United States flies in an airplane equipped with four engines, while we fly in twinjets.

As for New York State’s plan, my opinion is in the long run it will not work. Already it seems geese are returning to Prospect Park after the euthanizing of “the Prospect Park 400.” Also, why kill only 170,000? Why is that the magical goal? Why not kill all 250,000? If, as is true, a few wayward geese can strike another US Airways Airbus A320, and leave it powerless, what’s the magic in leaving behind 85,000? Given the lopsided shape to New York State, it defies logic that killing upstate geese will make a difference down state—where the high-traffic airports are located and the ones that inspired this action. I am no defender of geese (perhaps some should be killed, but that’s not at all clear to me even from reading the nine-page report prepared by government officials, as released by the Times); but, first, why do the geese carry all the blame? Has even one political leader stood up and asked the airlines why they are using two-engine airliners and, in so doing, leaving the travelling public vulnerable to strikes by any of the thirteen species of large birds whose populations are dramatically on the rise in North America? Or has the Mayor’s office expressed regret that several New York City dumps were thoughtlessly placed too close to its airports? (It is noteworthy that when Hitchcock filmed “The Birds,” most of the bird scenes were filmed at dumps, always loaded with birds.) What coöperation or compliance do city and state officials seek from businesses, located near airports, that attract birds or small animal life that, in turn, attract birds of prey?

I can’t tell how many geese should be killed to help protect airports, but it is unlikely that one state’s program of euthanizing can solve the problem. As one insightful person commented, as regards the killing of geese in Prospect Park, “Where does it all end?” The plan to euthanize in New York State was triggered by the emergency landing of U.S. Airways 1549. Can you imagine what happens if there are two successive catastrophic airliner crashes in different parts of the U.S., caused by bird strikes and involving huge loss of life? What will we propose: a national pogrom against Canada geese?

As recommended in my book, what is truly needed is a comprehensive program of risk management of bird and wildlife strikes. It needs to be one that is transparent and that people trust. It needs to be a national program that involves all 50 states. The plan I recommend is outlined in “Transport Canada’s Sharing the Skies.” Very briefly, but fully elaborated upon in “Bird Strike,” it offer three tiers of defense against damaging bird and wildlife strikes:

• First, reduce exposure to bird and other wildlife hazards;
• Second, reduce the probability of strikes; and
• Third, reduce the severity of strikes when they occur—as they inevitably will.

I am not against killing birds to reduce the threat of bird strikes, if it is part of an overall system-wide safety approach to reduce damaging bird strikes on aircraft. But I am against hanging everything on gassing birds as the prime and only solution. There is surely a pathway to safer skies for both air travelers and for birds.

I found some of the most interesting parts of the book to be those that documented the history of bird strikes. I had no idea that Wright brothers had encountered one of their own!

I wish I could tell you more about that, but all we have is that one short entry in the diaries of Orville and Wilbur Wright, September 7, 1905, that notes that Orville “flew 4,751 meters in 4 minutes 45 seconds, four complete circles. Twice passed over fence into Beard’s cornfield. Chased flock of birds for two rounds and killed one which fell on top of the upper surface and after a time fell off when swinging a sharp curve.”

Given the season and location, it’s likely that Orville struck a red-winged blackbird flying over Beard’s field to feed on the ripe corn. It was not significant since it caused the Wright brothers no problem; but they kept meticulous diaries, so they noted the event—probably not thinking much about it. Its significance, though, became evident on April 3, 1912, when Cal Rodgers crashed in the surf at Long Beach and died—after a gull had jammed the flight controls of his spruce-framed, linen-covered biplane. It was the first recorded death caused by bird strike. At the dawn of powered aviation, when the circle of those involved was small, Rodgers had been taught to fly by Orville Wright. It is ironic that Rodgers, despite being the first to fly across the U.S., a journey fraught with danger, was in the end killed by a common gull.

Chelsea Clinton, you may have heard, is getting hitched. And because we, the public, know basically none of the details, you may also have heard that we're obsessed—with the wedding, with the fact that we know nothing about it, and with the fact that we're obsessed. A photo of a woman emerging from a Vera Wang shop, her face artfully hidden beneath a wide-brimmed floppy hat, graced the cover of Women's Wear Daily yesterday, and was splashed around the Web. Could the lady be she? The cover is pretty, but it's also a nice symbol of the Chelsea Wedding Story: the human at the center of it all obscured, walking into media speculation about her consumer choices (in this case her wedding dress), and flanked by a bar code.

Does it say something horrible about us that we desperately desire to see Chelsea's wedding? I don't think so. Weddings, as Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz writes in "Wedding as Text: Communicating Cultural Identities Through Ritual," are rituals of astonishing complexity that "incorporate a variety of codes (e.g. liturgy, music, food, clothing, and objects)." When someone famous, to whom we are already used to looking for clues, subtle and not-so-subtle, about how to navigate our material and social worlds, has a wedding, it is as if everything meaningful they have to teach us has been magically corralled into a single space, a cauldron of societal mores.

Our natural curiosity is the lighter side of our fixation, of course. The darker side is supplied by both the multibillion-dollar wedding industry and our belief that we in some way have a right to Chelsea's special day. The two are not unrelated. In "The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture," Elizabeth Freeman briefly sketches the millennium-long history of marriage in the West:

Marriage has been regulated—and weddings officiated—by an overlapping sequence of institutions. Before the Christianization of Europe, fathers, families, and community customs regulated marriage, to be followed by priests and the church, then by magistrates and civil law, now inflected by a commercial industry, with the couple’s authority over the formation of their own marriage waxing and waning alongside these institutions.

Today, the couple is much more at the center of the marriage ceremony than it was five hundred years ago, but weddings are inherently both private and public affairs. The couple is still subject, as Freeman notes, to the authority of various institutions, not least of which is the commercial wedding industry (brilliantly delineated by our Rebecca Mead in "One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding"). We can surmise from Chelsea's (probable) presence at the Vera Wang store that she is as subject to the authority of that industry as the rest of us. But she is also, as a famous person, a major part of that industry—of how it sells itself—and this is why we think we have a right to her. We are told that we must copy the weddings of Chelsea and her ilk, and therefore it seems to us that in gawking we are simply obeying—that we have a right because we have no choice.

And perhaps we don't, so long as spectacles of glitzy celebrity ceremonies dominate our view. Here's hoping that more famous brides and grooms, instead of allowing the media to become yet another authority at their weddings, drop big floppy hats over the entire affair.

How will the release of George W. Bush's memoir shape political campaigns this November?

Eighteen bookstores in Charlotte, North Carolina, are donating funds to local public libraries.

Perhaps Shakespeare's Iago is not the only "motiveless" villain in literature—or in life.

Stieg Larsson has become the first author to sell more than one million Kindle e-books.

Some summer camps require children to forgo electronic communication and send handwritten letters home instead.

Will books targeted at young women and girls ever stop sporting pink covers?

A reading list to match the summer heat: six new novels about illicit love.

Borders has signed an agreement with the mobile-media company JiWire that will allow companies to run advertisements targeting customers using the wireless networks in Borders stores and cafés.

Some F. Scott Fitzgerald fans are disappointed with the new "The Great Gatsby" video game.

A mashup we can get behind.

Via Jezebel.

When news emerged last month that Stieg Larsson’s fourth, unfinished book is set largely in Canada, the announcement forced some nagging worries&#8212only incipient when I was reading the trilogy&#8212to float prominently to the surface of my mind. The first three Larsson books feature sadists, dungeon torture chambers, serial murderers, gangster-murderers, murderers incapable of feeling pain, murderers killing under the guise of government jobs, and, well, you get it, a lot of killing. Yet all of this takes place&#8212you know it by now, no doubt&#8212in Sweden. Sweden, I thought? Larsson’s native land, of course, but I had to wonder whether there were more murders in each book than occurred in the notoriously neutral, progressively peace-loving country in an entire year. A little research revealed that this was not quite so&#8212statistics vary, but there seem to be at least a hundred to two hundred per year, and the rate is rising slightly. Still, this is a country with fifteen times the population of DC and, at most, twice the murders. It would be hard not to notice the pattern left by a serial murderer, and pretty sensational if, among all the petty homicides, domestic disputes, and robberies gone wrong, there were many creepy sadists in the mix.

And then to move to Canada, which has an even lower murder rate? It’s as if Larsson were searching out the most laughably infertile ground for killings he could.

As is often the case in a Larsson book, however, looking into one mystery produced another, a sequel so to speak. Many believe that Larsson, who died of a heart attack at age fifty, was murdered for his far-left politics, as if the long arm of his fiction had reached out to enter his life. And maybe it has. My research began to turn up aspects of Larsson’s biography that sounded oddly fictional, first among them that Larsson has a Paul-Austerian doppelganger&#8212a twin more appropriate to postmodern crime fiction than Larsson’s narratives. I know it’s the influence of too many dark books and horrific climaxes but, when I read the mirroring description of the two Larssons&#8212and their parallel lives&#8212on Wikipedia, a small chill went through me, and my mind was off and running with strange conspiracy theories of its own:

Larsson’s first name originally was Stig which is the standard spelling. In his early twenties, he changed it to avoid confusion with his friend Stig Larsson, who would go on to become a well-known author well before Stieg did. At the time, they were amateur photographers and it was in this capacity that they wished to prevent any misunderstanding; neither had yet published a book. Stieg Larsson, in later years, would tell the story that the two men had tossed a coin to decide who was to change his name, but this is disputed by Stig Larsson. The pronunciation is the same regardless of spelling.

(“Sweden Map 2,” by Juliee3 , via Flickr.)

On this day in 1540, Henry VIII had his chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, executed on charges of treason. After Cromwell's head was chopped off, it was boiled and stuck on a pike on the Tower of London, a sign to all passersby not to betray the king. Accordingly, we at the Book Bench have assembled several covers from books—three works of fiction and one of non-fiction—that deal with traitors and treacherous acts. But watch out! One man's traitor may be another man's hero.

And for those of you who feel betrayed that I, and not Ian, am doing the Covers Contest this week, never fear. He will be back next week.

Submit the first fully correct response via e-mail and win a copy of the brand-new anthology “The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker.” In the event of confusion, consult our official rules. We’ll announce the winner tomorrow afternoon.

This week, Alice Fulton’s poem “Claustrophilia” appears in the magazine. Last week, I chatted with Fulton over e-mail about word choice, the difference between prose and poetry, and the musicality of language.

In “Claustrophilia,” you use a specialist’s terms (“moxibustion,” “immolation,” “analgesia”) to describe “romance as usual.” As a poet, how do you come across words like “moxibustion”?

Moxibustion is an ancient Chinese medical treatment like acupuncture. I stumbled on the word while searching for something else, as so often happens. In moxibustion, an herb, traditionally mugwort, is burned very close to the skin as a means of relieving pain. The idea is to get as close as possible while carefully avoiding any painful contact. I keep coming back to proximity in my poems, and the concept of moxibustion suggested another way to think about closeness, intimacy.

Why did you decide to use these words in a poem about everyday love?

I like to use different registers of diction in poems as a means of creating various emotional shades. Because so much weight is placed on each word in poetry, a single specialized term can shift the tone. A medical word like “analgesia,” with its clinical sound and connotations, has a distancing effect; it chills the tone. By including such words, even a short poem can invoke a range of emotions without resorting to explication. A single word will resonate, and the poem doesn’t have to say more.

How do you define poetry? What distinguishes it from prose?

Poetry emphasizes music, rhythm, reticence, multiplicity. These qualities, present in prose to varying degrees, are intensified in poetry, framed and underscored by the poetic line. The language of poetry is more distilled and oblique than the language of prose, which tends to be purposeful. A newspaper, for instance, is written to convey information efficiently. We don’t linger over news stories, reveling in the language, mesmerized by the unsaid. A poem, on the other hand, invites readers to fill in the blanks. It lives in the space between words. Like a joke or a koan, a poem can’t be explained. It has meaning, but it doesn’t have a “message;” its stratas are too vast and complex to be neatly summarized. There are unspoken implications at every turn; you have to intuit it, “get it.” It’s recursive, an infinite regress.

In fact, I think of poems as having vertical depth. It’s as if prose is a horizontal structure, built across a surface, while poetry is a catacomb. Prose speeds the eye onwards, while poems resist—and purposely impede— that forward movement. Their language is so faceted—strange, rich—that it creates beautiful obstacles and sends the eye backwards over lines, enticing us to slow down and reread. Rather than pulling us forward, a poem drives us more deeply into the page. Its resistance should give pleasure; we go back because we want to experience this uncanny thing again. Maybe prose is like walking while poetry is like dancing. We walk to get somewhere, always moving forward. But we dance just to dance, and the movement sometimes goes backwards or downwards.

Your verse has been featured in “Best American Poetry,” your fiction in “Best American Short Stories”—a distinction shared by only two other writers: Lydia Davis and Stuart Dybeck. How did you come to write fiction, too? Why is it so rare for poets to write prose, and vice versa?

I think the best advice is to try to write the kind of book you love to read. I’ve always loved both fiction and poetry, and I thought it would be thrilling to build a world for readers, with characters, dialogue, place, something you don’t get to do in lyric poetry. The first story I tried felt like work, but by the second one I was having fun. In fact, I felt transported, and that was a hook. Some of my early poetry had an interest in character and voice, but I’ve come to think that narrative is best played out in fiction. Writing fiction meant my poems could focus on those things only poetry can do.

For a writer, fiction and poetry require different ways of thinking, different techniques, and some people seem hardwired for one or the other. Most writers say they feel more at home in one genre than the other, and so the choice is made to specialize. This question of temperament and ability might be the main reason so few people write both poetry and fiction.

Also, practically speaking, the worlds of poetry and fiction are completely separate, and it’s hard to build one career and identity, let alone two. Each genre steals time from the other. Still, I can’t be so pragmatic. I wanted to write fiction, so I did.

You have said that you try “to be a student of inconvenient knowledge—the sort of knowledge that, when taken to heart, forces us to change our lives in revolutionary ways.” In what ways might “Claustrophilia” force us to change?

In 1999, I published an essay in the Nation called “The Poetry of Inconvenient Knowledge.” The “inconvenient knowledge” I meant was—most simply—suffering. The suffering of sentient beings—humans and animals. The more you learn about it, the harder it is to be “culturally correct.” For instance, it isn’t convenient to learn how animals are slaughtered, to witness that process. It’s easier to chose not to know, close your eyes to it, rationalize, and eat another hamburger. Often, if you really face up to what’s going on, you have to change your life. At least, that’s how it seems to me.

My world view permeates the poems, but the poems don’t try to force anyone to change; that would be too bullying or didactic. A poem’s relation to social change is quietly subversive. Of course, some poems are more charged than others. There’s always something at stake, but often it isn’t overtly political.

“Claustrophilia” is a love poem in the broadest sense; it considers proximity. The tone is ironic, humorous, but the lines “tell them anguish / is the universal language” do invoke suffering. Proximity is at the heart of compassion. How near or far we feel from others affects our feelings and our actions.

Your poems have been compared to “a subtle, magnificent jazz.” One even inspired an operatic score. What kind of music do you think your poetry most resembles?

Poems make their own music, so it’s hard to come up with an exact analogy. Mine might be like music that moves between idioms, a hybrid music. The voice is my favorite instrument because it’s so idiosyncratic, human, and moving. The voice and the words are one.

I enjoy most kinds of music, including jazz. The opera you mentioned, “Give,” by the composer Enid Sutherland, draws upon an eclectic and powerful musical vocabulary. In addition to being a composer, Sutherland is a world class viola da gambist; her field is early music, and the opera shows traces of this affinity as well as the influence of Big Mama Thornton and others. It’s wildly original. I was amazed to hear how Sutherland’s music articulated the subtext of my poems— without any exposition. Music reaches into our nervous systems and infiltrates us in unbidden ways. That might be why it’s so enchanting.

Neil Gaiman recommends three books for children.

Are Tea Party members misappropriating George Orwell?

Peter Carey's "Parrot and Olivier in America" and Tom McCarthy's "C" are among the fourteen books on the longlist for this year's Man Booker Prize.

Max Brooks, whose apocalyptic "World War Z" is soon to be adapted into a movie starring Brad Pitt, answers the question "Will we ever be finished with zombies?"

Apple has been accused of censoring pornographic novels on the iPad book chart.

Is there a right way to fill a bookshelf?

No more "school tunics." Enid Blyton's "Famous Five" series will be updated for the twenty-first century.

The tombstone of the artist Robert Seymour, who committed suicide after Dickens dropped him as the illustrator for "The Pickwick Papers," has been relocated to the garden of one of Dickens's London homes.

The Web site for Bret Easton Ellis’s new book, “Imperial Bedrooms,” is fa-an-cy. Here’s a screenshot:

Yes, you have to click a box certifying that you are over eighteen, because the “experience” contains adult material. What is the experience? It’s a choose-your-own-adventure game in which you play a director on a casting couch trying to get an actress to take off her clothes and engage in other unseemly behavior. At any point, you may choose "Let Her Go," and save your soul. But keep plying her with alcohol and drugs and...well, if you're a casting director for porn, you know what happens. It’s facile, tawdry, and empty, while somehow also being morally pretentious. Or, as J. Robbert Lennon writes on the LRB blog, “it does offer a neat little analogue of [Ellis’s] literary aesthetic.” But here—watch this video interview Ellis did with the Guardian. In it, he says:

We don’t live in this kind of tactile, sensuous culture anymore where we feel things. Everything’s digitized, including our love lives, including how we hook up with people, how we listen to music, read books, get our information. We end up creating a society full of narcissists who then adapt to the culture of narcissism, and it’s no longer a culture of narcissism anymore. It’s something else. It becomes the norm.

So, reading this, I might interpret the Web site as an attempt both to critique our digitized lives and to contribute to that phenomenon; a way of drawing in the digital-loving narcissists not because one wants to but because one must (the narcissists being the norm as well as the audience for the book). But now I’m getting confused. Could it be because I’m attempting to read too much into it? I think that’s what Ellis would say. Later in the video, he remarks:

My books come from a very, very personal place. And I don’t mean to be prescient about anything, and I don’t mean to make any kind of sweeping statements about the state of the world.

I accept this as truth—that his books (and, by extension, the “Imperial Bedrooms” Web site—even if he didn't make it, he has to own it) are motivated by personal experience. But just because something is personal doesn’t mean it’s not also a statement about the world, and Ellis’s work certainly carries that weight. Plus, a created work does much more than make statements about the world; at some point, it becomes the world. That’s what’s so interesting about the Web site: the line between creating and commenting that Ellis walks in his fiction doesn't hold up here at all. In participating in the game, one ceases to be a lover of literature ironically playing at undressing and soliciting sex from a girl, and becomes a lover of literature playing at undressing and soliciting sex from a girl. Is the point to turn us all into creeps? Or to acknowledge that we’re all already creeps to begin with? I’d guess that even the creators of the site don’t know the answer.

Tell-all political memoirs are ubiquitous on both sides of the Atlantic, but the rhetoric feels a bit different. A lot of American politicians bluster through biographies like they’re taking their allotted time on the Senate floor, while Britons, at least this current crop, the recently ousted men of New Labour, are catty and vindictive, tripping over themselves in feats of one-upmanship that rival any good day in the House of Commons. Don’t get me wrong—I’m thoroughly convinced that British politicians are just as full of it as our own—but I tune into C-SPAN to watch “Prime Minister’s Questions,” and I know I’m not alone. In Parliament, MPs direct their ire toward the other side of the aisle; in the realm of the political memoir, they save just as much venom for their former colleagues.

The ink had barely dried on the Conservative coalition with the Lib-Dems when Lord Peter Mandelson, Labour’s so-called “prince of darkness,” began churning out his life story. In just two months he produced “The Third Man,” an account of the rise and fall of New Labour in which he, unsurprisingly, plays the pivotal role. Excerpts were serialized in the Times a few weeks ago—the paper paid him £350,000, which they may have made back in boosted circulation figures—and the book has been breaking sales records in the U.K., though no one seems particularly pleased with its contents or its author (one Amazon reviewer described it, or perhaps Mandelson himself, as “salacious, opportunist but annoyingly compelling”). Mandelson is quick to point fingers in “The Third Man,” and his targets have been equally quick to bite back—my favorite Labourite, the surly Alastair Campbell, seems to have chimed in merely to brag about his superior diary-keeping skills. Tony Blair, who’s been toiling over his own book for more than three years, was originally slated to publish it just a week later. After some negotiation, Blair’s “The Journey” is now due out in September; one Guardian reader wrote of the agreement: “This time the other guy got first dibs, so Tony couldn’t welsh on the deal.”

The original “other guy,” Gordon Brown, announced yesterday that his own book will be released in November. It’s probably for the best that he’s focussing on the global financial crisis; it seems likely that after a summer and an autumn of Labour backpedaling and backstabbing, the British public will be ready for a change of scene. You’ve got to hand it to them, though; American politics could use a little more irony and a lot more camp. Imagine Dick Cheney in this leather wingback:

A splendid distraction sprang into my inbox this afternoon in the form of Anne Trubek's cultural history of the interrobang. The interrowhatsit, you say? You've used it before, I suspect, unwittingly or in nascent form: it's the ?! of surprise and disbelief you smack at the end of some sentences except, in the case of the interrobang, the exclamation point and question mark are superimposed. What a typesetter's treasure! Trubek reveals that the punctuation mark was invented by a "Mad Men"-era ad man (who also, alas, chose the downright-dirty sounding name; another proposed name, the quesclamation mark, strikes me as capturing the glyph's particular élan better), and that in its heyday, Remington gave it its own typewriter key alongside your more humdrum commas and apostrophes.

Trubek's post led me down a rabbit hole of unknown punctuation (and to this befuddling quiz). Such finds! Who knew our most obscure bits of punctuation also had such obscurely lovely names? I felt I could chant them as a liturgy of linguistics, or recite them together as a quirky poem from Lewis Carroll, filled with the fantastic beasts of our language: there were guillemets, a pilcrow, a caret, a sheffer stroke, a chevron. There was even an irony mark, a piece of punctuation I thought could render many an e-mail less offensive and many a blog post obsolete (until, that is, I found the unquestionably superior snark mark, denoted by a wiggly snakelike line at the end of a sentence).

But if the idea of adding punctuation marks to the language inspired in me a temporary editor’s glee (for a moment, I imagined myself the cackling wolf, saying, Ah, my little red writing hood, the better to delineate your sentences with!), I soon found my view of these novel marks wandering into an unexpected area. I’m a luddite and slow adapter, a late blooming texter and rare tweeter, someone who looks a little cross-eyed at the newest gadgets other members of my generation trumpet. But I realized these little pieces of punctuation reminded me most profoundly of a thing I thought I disdained: the emoticon. Both reflect back on the words before them, both color-in the lines, add emphasis and feeling. And the comparison, much to my shame, showed me that it was not the elegant pen marks and brief blocks of type that added the largest range of expression to a sentence. It was those cheery, chubby faces, instant purveyors of mood.

(Interrobang by Fritz Klinke, via Flickr)

In November, Simon & Schuster will publish a book on the global economic crisis by Gordon Brown.

The president of the French University of Provence Aix-Marseille cancelled a March 2011 writers' conference after scheduled participants protested the inclusion of the Israeli author Esther Orner.

Why can't e-books for the Kindle be given as gifts?

College bookstores will soon allow students to rent textbooks for half the cost of purchasing them.

Tracy Kidder on M.F.A. writing programs, literary journalism, and the dangers of using the "swashbuckling first person" narrator.

Redesigned covers of classic novels: for better or for worse.

Maurice Sendak has made a one-million-dollar donation to the Jewish Board of Family & Children's Services.

Curious George will star in new public-service advertisements urging parents to read with their children.

Why do the Sherlock Holmes stories remain appealing generations after they were written?

“20 Under 40” continues this week with a story by twenty-five-year-old Téa Obreht. “Blue Water Djinn” is told from the perspective of Jack, whose mother works at a resort hotel in Egypt on the Red Sea. In haunting, vivid prose, Obreht captures the mysteriousness of the sea as it appears to a young boy:

Past the breakwater, out where the sea is as clear and bright as ice, is the ship that the atoll broke years ago, the waves dashing it against the rocks in a ragged bend on the eastern side of the lighthouse. It is an old ship, rusted gray and green, a Navy gunboat, and it lies on its flank like the eviscerated body of an enormous fish, its smooth glass-window eyes smashed in and crowded with darkness….

It holds the boy, the corpse of that ship, because of its murky secrets, its rusted grottoes and metal lagoons. He thinks about it when the moon comes out of the water behind the atoll, thinks about seawater filling the cold cavity of the hull, the swelling walls of silver batfish up against the ceiling where the crusted barnacles live. He thinks about the water djinn: their teeth, their hands, what they see down there in the darkness. He has seen their lights around the ship at night, the green glow of their underwater torches, and he imagines them hovering in the water-worn doorways, their mouths red with the flesh of men, their wrists braceleted in seaweed, singing, weaving moonbeams into their hair.

Read the rest of the story online, and check out our Q. and A. with Obreht.

We love some books because they bring us to faraway places, and others because they shed new light on life back home. The books we often cherish most, however, are the ones given to us by people we love.

This may be the inspiration for In My Book, a card-and-bookmark combination designed by Robin K. Blum. Blum says that the cards, which are blank inside and have a detachable-bookmark front, grew out of the handmade bookmarks she would give friends and family. The cards are inscribed with cute, if hokey, dedications—"In My book, you're pure poetry," "In my book, you're the last word"—and feature sweet illustrations by Meredith Hamilton and Anthony Russo. Wide enough for a short note, they fit comfortably inside a paperback, a picture of an open book just peeking out from the top.

Natasha Trethewey, the author of several poetry collections, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Native Guard," recently journeyed to North Gulfport, Mississippi, her hometown, to take stock of the post-Katrina landscape. She visited with her brother Joel, who had recently been sentenced to jail time for selling cocaine, and chronicled her experiences in a series of poems for "Congregation," the second installment of a multimedia collaboration between Virginia Quarterly Review and “Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen” called In Verse, which was created in 2009 by radio producer Lu Olkowski and Ted Genoways, the editor of VQR. (You can view an excerpt here). Recently, I spoke with Trethewey about her involvement in the project.

What inspired “Congregation”?

"Congregation" and the book it's part of, "Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast," which is due out in September, is very much a pilgrimage, a journey back to my childhood home. My family story is interwoven with the larger story of the history of Gulfport; my brother's story in particular is emblematic of the kinds of losses and devastation suffered by the people on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. It's a story I know intimately, and one that I believe sheds light on the larger story still unfolding in towns all along the coast.

In writing under these special conditions—the temporal immediacy of your responses, the emotional immediacy of your subjects—did you learn anything that you’ll want to carry forward into your work?

A lot of people remarked about how vulnerable I seemed in those poems, and that’s the most important thing I learned. When I went down there to make this project, I thought it would not be difficult, because I had always been writing about my hometown and the people in it and its history and my family—and I always felt like an insider doing that. But this time, it was after my life had changed dramatically, after having won the Pulitzer, and the kind of attention that brings.

It hurt me to realize that even though I was from this place I wasn’t quite of it anymore. I had to picture the people of this place seeing me as not quite belonging; I was feeling revealed to them as an outsider. A lot of the poems turned on being personal, I think, because I couldn’t let go of trying to challenge myself on what I was doing. I thought in order for me to actually complete this project I had to critique it, and to critique my role in it.

What was your goal in taking this project on?

I had begun the project in the fall of 2007 when Ted Genoways asked me to go down there to prepare a series of lectures about recovery and rebuilding in the wake of Katrina. I went, and I wrote these three lectures, which I then gave at the University of Virginia in the fall of 2007. They became the first half of "Beyond Katrina." Then Ted asked me to go back and to continue what I had already done, the only difference being that this version would take the shape of poetry rather than non-fiction prose.

I got down there, and it hit me that I wasn’t just doing the same thing. Everything had changed from 2007. At this point, my brother had been sentenced to jail time for having four ounces of cocaine that he was delivering. He was serving about eleven months in jail. That was a really tense year. The prison system is horrible on inmates, it’s horrible on families. There’s all this uncertainty and worry, and that’s what the year had been like for me. I was still working on the prose book, and had begun to really make these connections between the devastation in the lives of people on the coast and my brother’s life. I realized how my brother’s life was emblematic of that devastation; that his story could speak for many stories of people who are less visible, whom we don’t see struggling—the stories we may not know, about recovery and the choices people make when they have no jobs or they’ve lost everything.

The concept of “documentary poetry” is fascinating, and also somewhat counterintuitive. How does being tied to the truth affect your ability to make poetic leaps?

Well, sometimes you get lucky, and what people do is just poetic. What makes “Benediction” my favorite of the poems is its sheer observation of the day my brother got out of jail. He was with his friends and fellow inmates waving and wishing him well, to go out and start that new life that he had ahead of him. That wasn’t so hard to do. It wasn’t hard to sit back and look at that and find what was figurative about it.

The hardest poem for me in “Congregation” is a contemplation of the meanings of words. I had been very concerned with the meaning of my name when I was writing my last book. My mother was murdered by my step-father, my brother’s father, who was also named Joel, twenty-five years ago. Whatever sadness or burden I’ve been living with since then, my brother’s also been living with, but he’s lived with the added burden of having the exact same name as our mother’s murderer. It had never occurred to me, the way he was imprisoned in his own name. Not until then.

Did you mention this realization to your brother?

One day we were visiting him at the prison, and his daughter was sitting between us and she asked me, “how do you pronounce my daddy’s name?” And I said, “Joel.” And then she looked at him and said, “See?” And he said, “Now what did I tell you? I pronounce my name ‘Joe-El.’ Doesn’t matter how she pronounces it.” And I didn’t know this, but we talked about it later on, and he wrote about it in some of the letters he sent me from prison. He started pronouncing his name differently, as a way to make it different from his father’s name. And I didn’t know; I wasn’t up to speed on the new name. So then I realized what a burden it is for him to carry that name all those years.

How did Joel feel about this project?

My brother loved it, actually. He was so proud of it. He was writing these letters to me that were meditations about his life, and he told me that knowing that it was happening and that he was part of it gave him something to look forward to, that it gave him some purpose. I think he felt deeply honored to have his story told in such a way that people might actually empathize with him.

Two articles this weekend made me terribly sympathetic for parents who cannot get their children to read. "It's like pulling out fingernails. He absolutely does not want to read ... I read constantly growing up. So did his mother. So does his eight-year-old sister, but he's a go-go kid. To him, books are a waste of time.” So says Todd in the Globe and Mail. Todd is the poor bedraggled father of Hunter, who is thirteen and who lives in a place called Muscle Shoals, Alabama. What does the go-go kid have to say for himself? Not much, but he'll say it for boys everywhere: “Some books can be pretty boring and I just don't feel like reading them... I think a lot of boys feel like that.”

Lest you think that non-reading progeny only happen to parents who are not true book-lovers, the Globe and Mail also interviews James Patterson, who says that parents "have to take the responsibility seriously." His own son, Jack, hated reading, and so Patterson "began writing for young people, including the Daniel X alien-hunter series, which has a new installment out this month."

The Globe and Mail article is actually about the fact that many people think that fart and poop books are good for boys because they get them to read. Boys must be made to read at all costs because of the "achievement" gender gap, which "now exists in nearly every U.S. state and has widened to mammoth proportions—as much as 10 percentage points in some."

Now this is a spur to parents to force their sons to read, to be sure, the idea that they'll be doomed to a life of househusbandry while their clever wives move ever closer to earning as much as their male counterparts (assuming, of course, that the clever wives haven't run off with each other). But that the problem is not limited to the stronger sex is evidenced by an article in the Times about sad little Snooki Polizzi, from "Jersey Shore."

This piece, written by Cathy Horyn, is one of the more unabashedly snobby things I've read in a while. I would say that it's mean, but how else are we readers of the Times, we considerers of the hoi polloi, supposed to approach a quantity like Snooki but with a cool gaze? The fascination with Snooki, Horyn writes, lies partly in her looks: "She is busty and short-waisted with small legs; sort of like a turnip turned on its tip"; but also in her personality, that is to say in her brain, the thing that sits beneath the "half-doughnut-shaped pouf on top of her head." Snooki, Horyn writes, "simply isn’t capable of serious introspection." And why not? Because "she has read only two books in her life, 'Twilight' and 'Dear John.' "

I started this post by saying I felt sorry for the parents of children who don't read, and so I do. The Snooki article focusses on her relationship with her father, an auto-salvage manager from Marlborough, New York. Do I feel sorry for him for having a daughter like Snooki? Not a bit. She loves him and he loves her. But I feel sorry for him because, had she grown up reading books, she might not have wound up on a reality show, and therefore might have avoided winding up in the Times.

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“Mad Men,” which returns to AMC this Sunday night, is a television show that sometimes thinks it’s a novel—in particular, a John Cheever novel. Like Cheever, the Draper family lives in Ossining, New York, and their colorful address—42 Bullet Park Road—is an allusion to one of the author’s novels. The literary references don’t end with Cheever. The characters on “Mad Men” read almost as much as they smoke, drink, and cheat. Bert Cooper extols the virtues of Ayn Rand, Don Draper broods over Frank O’Hara’s poetry, and the secretaries at Sterling Cooper furtively pass around an “unexpurgated” copy of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” warning each other not to read it on the train because “it’ll attract the wrong element.”

Given its bookish appeal, it’s perhaps no surprise that “Mad Men” has sparked a publishing boomlet of its own. Released last month, “Mad Men and Philosophy: Nothing Is As It Seems,” is a look at the show’s many existential dilemmas. In October, the show’s costume designer will release a style book, called “The Fashion File.” The most recent, and possibly the richest of the “Mad Men” books, is “Mad Men Unbuttoned: A Romp Through 1960s America,” by Natasha Vargas-Cooper.

The book, which began as a wonderfully diverting blog, is an attempt to “re-create the cultural matrix” of this time period in order to “understand the most dramatic cultural shift in the twentieth century.” Divided into themed chapters—sex, literature, advertising, fashion—“Mad Men Unbuttoned” examines the show’s many allusions, literary and otherwise. Naturally, there are several entries about drinking and smoking, but some of the topics are less expected: there is, for instance, a discussion of what Sally Draper might have in common with Merry Levov of “American Pastoral,” and another essay about how Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart inspired Don Draper’s “sexual alchemy.” “Mad Men Unbuttoned” is a well-versed primer to the most literate show on television, the perfect thing to have on hand if, say, you’re finally catching up on the first three seasons—which, by the way, you really should.

I spoke with Vargas-Cooper earlier this week. An edited version of our conversation follows.

You quote several cultural critics in the book—Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion. I’m wondering what came first. Did the show lead you to them, or did your knowledge of their writing inform your understanding of the show?

When I watched the show, it was like hearing a note from a song and going, “Oh, what is that from?” There’d be a conversation between Don and his mistress about [the Antonioni film] “La Notte,” and I’d be, like, “I have to look up ‘La Notte.’ ” I studied history in school, so you get into the raw, amorphous stuff of history and you want the analysis. I asked myself, “Who were the great thinkers of this time? What did Norman Mailer and Susan Sontag say about this moment in time?”

You obviously did quite a lot of research for the book. Can you talk about this process? Any exciting discoveries?

I started with a list of a hundred and twenty-six topics I was going to write about, inspired by things from the show. My plan was to write a mini-essay on each of them, and then it became eighty-six mini-essays. It’s very difficult for me to take on a writing project without feeling like I can walk around in the universe that I’m writing about. One of the things about blogging is that it’s pretty ephemeral—you want to get something up on Sunday night. Because it’s an instant medium, the challenge becomes “Find the coolest shit as fast as you can!” I’m really good at finding cool shit fast, and I already have a reservoir of this historical information in my head, so that helped. But with the book, I decided to treat it like a real book, not a blog-to-book. I spent a lot of time at the Cal Arts archive. I did a tremendous amount of historical photo research. All of the big ad heavies—Draper Daniels, George Lewis—they all wrote autobiographies and they’re all a delight to read; they’re all quippy and tell the same story over and over again, along the lines of “They said I could never make it, but I took them by the cojones and the boss said ‘I like your cojones.’ ” Over and over again, the same story.

What do you make of the show’s bookishness? And what do you think the characters will be reading this season?

I think it’s awesome in the sense that no medium is inherently better at storytelling than another; I like that nod. I think of the show as a visual novel. I don’t know what will happen this season, and I’m not sure entirely what they’re going to be reading. But look at the Cheever, Updike, and Philip Roth books that come out at that time. Well, I’m just going to tell you that little Gene Draper doesn’t have a chance: in all those books, a baby dies. I do think that in terms of the literature, if there is one strain that will cross over to the show, it will be the idea that these people have repressed their feelings, and there eventually will be a terrible consequence—say, like what you have in “Revolutionary Road.” I think it’s going to get really dark. Baby Gene is definitely marked in some way; I think we have an “Omen” on our hands.

The new season picks up late in 1964. It’s a rich time in history, to be sure, but are there any events in particular that you think should be written into the next season?

In the summer of 1964, the surgeon general definitively says that cigarettes are bad for you and requires manufacturers to make warning labels for the first time. Given that Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce’s only big-ticket client is Lucky Strike, that could be a problem. It’s also the year that the Beatles arrive in America, so if Don’s smart, he’ll start selling lunchboxes, and not cigarettes.

From the production design to the costumes, “Mad Men” strives for a level of historical accuracy that’s fairly unprecedented for television: it’s a fictional show that strives for reality. Meanwhile, we have so-called reality shows that are staged. What do you make of this contradiction?

I think that one of the dangers of post-modernism is where do we go from here? I think that at least in regards to reality TV, there are moments of great truth in shows like “American Idol” and “Intervention.” There are these moments of unfiltered pathos, which people have been responding to since Greek times. It’s really forced scripted dramas to up their game. I don’t know if one necessarily causes the other, but the fact that they’re happening simultaneously is related.

Why do you think the show resonates so powerfully with contemporary audiences?

It isn’t just that it looks beautiful and that Jon Hamm is a miracle. It’s that the mood in the show is concurrent with the mood right now. The big villain on “Mad Men” is history. No matter what happens to these people’s lives, you know what’s coming next, and there’s absolutely nothing that can be done to help these people feel like they’re any less subject to the throes of history. I feel like part of the reason why we relate to “Mad Men” so much is that we’re in the same kind of moment right now. Our generation is transitional. I think there’s a yearning for truth that comes through in a variety of ways, in shows like this and in “Breaking Bad” and “The Sopranos.”

So what might a “Mad Men”-style show about 2010 look like?

I think there is a “Mad Men” show about our era and it’s “Breaking Bad.” If someone wanted a social document—like “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” was for women’s lib—then I think “Breaking Bad” is that right now. It’s about facing the void, the merciless universe. [The main character, Walter White] has cancer and decides not to fight it and is trying to make as much money as possible for his family before he dies. As a woman in her late twenties who just published a book, I’m never going to have a pension and I know that. I feel like that show is about us.

Your book is inspired by “Mad Men,” but it’s really more of a handbook of the early sixties than it is a guide to the show. Was this intentional?

I went into this thinking I’d just write a longer version of the blog. Then I realized that wouldn’t be the case. I wanted it to be a lasting object, and to be lasting history: “Mad Men” will come and go, but you could still look at each essay and it’s as sturdy and accessible as possible. What does this say about this moment? What does it say about right now? How do we make this last? I thought about really tying it to the historical changes of this time period. You have the twilight of the Eisenhower era and the beginning of the counter-culture. That’s a very discrete, small amount of time to focus on, to figure out what the hell is going on. From 1957 to 1961, all of those things that didn’t yet have a name, but which dominated the sixties&#8212they were all there, and they were percolating. This unspoken rebellion, the increasingly out-of-touch aristocracy, the value placed on people being young&#8212all of these things that we know are going to explode and take over the cultural landscape are there, but it’s all very detached, under the surface.

Flipping through the exquisite photographs in Simone and In&#233s Ortega’s “The Book of Tapas” made me instantly nostalgic for a week I once spent in Madrid. I remembered plentiful, inexpensive wine; olives of every shape and hue; ham so good I was still stuffing it in my mouth when I got on the plane to leave.

My task was to recreate my Madrid tapas experience using only this book, ingredients I could find in New York, and my apartment’s comically small kitchen. I invited four guests—ambitious, perhaps—and on the night before the party began the daunting task of choosing which dishes to prepare. At four hundred and thirty pages, “The Book of Tapas” is nothing short of encyclopedic: common Spanish ingredients are listed in a section at the front, and the recipes that follow seem to combine and re-combine these ingredients in every possible permutation. (The book is divided into no-nonsense categories: vegetables cold, vegetables hot, egg and cheese cold, egg and cheese hot, etc.) As a start, I eliminated anything that required a deep-fryer (so long, croquettes) and recipes calling for hard-to-find sea creatures (baby eel, octopus). My guest list included one vegetarian, so I needed a mixture of vegetable and meat dishes. And because I did not want to spend the whole party in the kitchen on a hot summer night, I decided to choose several tapas that could be prepared ahead of time and served chilled.

I settled on olive caviar, mushroom and olive salad, baked cheese sticks, and melon balls with ham, all of which I would make before the party. After the guests arrived, I would duck into the kitchen to whip up patatas bravas and fried green asparagus with garlic, vinegar, and paprika. All but one of the ingredients were easily found and purchased Whole Foods. For my beloved serrano ham, I was happy to trek to Despaña, a Spanish food boutique in Soho. While I waited for the ham to be sliced, I tasted dozens of cheeses set out on sampling tables throughout the store.

Back at home, I got to work on the cold dishes. For the olive caviar, one blends anchovies, olives, capers, and olive oil in a food processor until a paste is formed. Mine never reached the creamy consistency of the spread in the photograph, partly because I quit when my tiny blender (the late-night infomercial variety) began to smoke. For the mushroom and olive salad, I sautéed a chopped red bell pepper and whole mushrooms before adding tomato sauce, olives, and garlic. The recipe said to simmer the mixture for ten minutes, but the end result looked more like a sauce to put on something else than a salad to eat alone. As I put it into the refrigerator to cool, I worried that I should have cooked the mixture longer to let the liquid reduce. Fortunately, the baked cheese sticks were fun to make: melt butter in a pan, combine with flour, bread crumbs, and parmesan, fashion into logs with your hands, and then bake at 400 degrees. Mine came out looking more like slugs than like neat, square, sticks, but I was pleased to find that they didn’t crumble when they came out of the oven.

The ham-wrapped melon balls were just as simple as they sound. After scooping out the insides of a ripe cantaloupe, I wrapped each ball with a thin strip of ham and then inserted a toothpick. As I worked, stealing tastes of ham, it occurred to me that “The Book of Tapas” relies more on the quality of the ingredients than on the skill of the chef. Many of the dishes, I realized, could be prepared with minimal effort and then served as appetizers that would make any dinner party seem more sophisticated.

I made many more than the twenty-four ham-wrapped melon balls that the recipe called for, and ate at least ten as I worked, juice running down my chin. Because the recipes were so easy, I finished with plenty of time to clean up before the party. I’d asked my guests to bring wine, but at the last minute, again thinking of Spain, I panicked and dashed out to buy two bottles of Rioja. Tapas are bar-food, after all, and I find that people are more receptive to my culinary experiments when they’ve had enough to drink.

As soon my guests walked through the door, I filled their glasses and set them to work on the food. As predicted, the ham with melon was a big hit; even the vegetarian seemed intrigued. And, though I’d worried about the consistency of the olive and mushroom salad, the ingredients had blended well, the olive and garlic giving the tomato a rich, complex taste. The baked cheese sticks were also popular; everyone agreed that when combining butter, flour, and cheese, there is very little that can go wrong. Most of us loved the tangy flavor of the parmesan, although one naysayer insisted that the cheese taste should have been even stronger. Of all of the dishes, only the olive caviar was left uneaten. For the vegetarian’s benefit, I’d announced that the spread contained anchovies, which made everyone squeamish. Worse, the anchovies, capers, and olives—each salty on their own—had combined to make something that tasted too much like the sea.

Everyone was in a good mood when I headed back to the kitchen to cook the patatas bravas: small potatoes (I’d bought fingerlings) boiled, then peeled and topped with a sauce of olive oil, white wine vinegar, paprika, garlic, and Worcestershire sauce. I enlisted the vegetarian, a self-proclaimed potato-boiling expert, to help me decide when the potatoes were ready, and they came out perfectly tender. But what made the dish great was the vinegary sauce, which was unanimously voted as one of the best tastes of the evening.

The final dish was the asparagus. Of all of the recipes, this one seemed the most unusual: bread is fried in a pan with oil, then dumped into a mortar and pestle and pounded with garlic to make a topping for the sautéed asparagus. After frying the bread, I chose an accomplice to operate the mortar and pestle (yes, I have one!) while I worked on the asparagus. At the very end, after the bread mixture and the asparagus were combined, I sprinkled white wine vinegar on top.

Again, the vinegar was the star of the show, combining with the garlicky fried bread in a way that made even those not usually fond of asparagus happy to eat their vegetables. As I looked around at all the empty plates and glasses, I realized that my tapas experiment—thanks to the Ortegas’ excellent book—had been a success. Along with the ample supply of wine, the six small dishes had made for a festive and satisfying meal with plenty of room for laughter and conversation.

We ended the night by eagerly sopping up the last of the vinegar sauces with bread.

Photos from “The Book of Tapas” courtesy of Phaidon Press www.phaidon.com.