Happy Friday, bookworms! The Round-Up is going live a day early, because I’ll be in Virginia this weekend for my friend Katie’s wedding.
- Boston.com has a map of the places in and around the city from famous (and not-so-famous) novels. You can find Allston (mentioned in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Wext Roxbury (from Nathaniel Hawthorne) and other favorites.
- Apparently, Hemingway was a KGB spy – and a bad one at that. The U.K.’s Guardian newspaper reports that Hemingway was recruited in the 1940′s, but as he failed to provide any valuable or useful information, contact with his Soviet handlers eventually stopped. His story is detailed in a new book from Yale University Press, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America.
- Americans don’t like books. At least not as much as food, shelter and other essentials. The Department of Labor released its survey of U.S. consumer expenditures. While shelter, transportation and food topped the list, books (or reading), came in at a measley 0.2% of total spending. A sad fact for librarians, surely.
- Last week, I mentioned the “best of the best” from the National Book Awards. Omnivoracious has helpfully compiled the full list of all 77 NBA winners and asks readers to select their three picks for the short list. I shamefully confess I haven’t read many of these, so I’ll just pick three of the ones I have: The Color Purple by Alice Walker, White Noise by Don DeLillo, and Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier.
- Matt Stewart is boldly going where no author has gone before – he’s releasing his novel, The French Revolution, entirely on Twitter - in 140 character tweets. According to his website, he decided to do so after being unable to sell the book to a publisher and because he started the project on Bastille Day and wanted to do something “revolutionary.”
- In honor of the release of the new Harry Potter movie, the Daily Show proudly offers it’s look back at the HP phenomenon. Warning: will induce laughter.
- There will be another book in the Twilight series – this time, a graphic novel. Yen Press will be publishing Twilight in graphic-novel form, with Stephenie Meyer as a consultant on the project. The stylized illustrations will be drawn by Korean artist Young Kim. The preview on Entertainment Weekly‘s website looks intriguing, though I’ll have to wait for the final edition before I make my judgments.
- The movie adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men will be released in September. The film, directed by The Office star John Krasinski, is a collection of stories that take the form of interview transcripts which were serialized in Harper’s, Esquire and the Paris Review.
- Lastly, quite simply because I couldn’t resist, a fan-made video of Pride and Prejudice, Harry Potter style:
