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Pop Culture

• Charlaine Harris drives a stake in the heart of her Southern Vampire series

  Earlier this week, novelist Charlaine Harris confirmed on Facebook that the next installment in her bestselling Southern Vampire Mysteries series will be the last. The basis for HBO’s hit show… Read more »

• The curse of being profiled in The New Yorker

  In a Salon essay Alec Nevala-Lee suggests that a New Yorker profile may actually be a curse for Hollywood’s biggest talent, such that “whenever a New Yorker profile shows a… 1 / Read more »

• Across the river and into the lobby

  Following in the footsteps of celebrity hoteliers Jimmy Buffett, David Copperfield, and Olivia Newton-John, the entrepreneurial folks minding Ernest Hemingway’s estate have entered a global agreement with developers to build a… Read more »

• I’ve been Kerouacking through life — but I should have been a Faulkner

  Alexander Nazaryan at the Daily News (New York — not L.A. or Galveston) has compiled a list of neologisms, taken from the online Urban Dictionary, all derived from the names of famous… Read more »

• RSC bringing Roald Dahl’s Matilda to Broadway

  The Royal Shakespeare Company has announced plans to transport its hit musical Matilda, based on the classic Roald Dahl novel, to New York early next year. Dahl’s beloved children story centers… Read more »

• On the BFG, Basil Fawlty and Lars Iyer: fictional characters inspired by real people

  Words was oh such a twitch-tickling problem to the BFG. He knew exactly what words he was wanting to say, but somehow or other they was always getting squiff-squiddled around.… Read more »

• Pulitzer-winning poet Louise Glück posts 5-star Yelp review of cleaning service

  Or actually, to be more exact, her assistant posted the review for her. (Via The Poetry Foundation) Here it is: Assuming these are actually her words, Glück’s Yelp shares with her poetry… Read more »

• The Banksy of public poetry

  On days when the unending visual onslaught of urban life begins to feel overwhelming, some of us (we are probably all artists or designers) bemoan the state of our culture… Read more »

• SLIDESHOW: Are dachshunds the most artful of dogs?

  Nabokov admired one. Chekhov cuddled with one. E.B. White wrote poetry to them. Gary Shteyngart tweets about one. (Also: Warhol had two. Picasso drew one.) At The New York Daily News’s Page Views… 7 / Read more »

• Parsing the race for the presidency

  What’s in a name? If the Best American Poetry blog is to be believed, the key to success in the presidential elections. In 2008 the blog proposed a ‘Trochaic Theory’,… Read more »