LINKS

* Garbiel Garcia Marquez has renounced his decision to quit writing and has reportedly finished a new novel

* Paul Verhaeghen has won the Independent foreign fiction prize for his novel, Omega Minor, published in the U.S. by the Dalkey Archive Press

* And he's giving the prize money to the ACLU 

* Have a look at Marcelo's blog for a quick introduction to Macedonio Fernandez, aka Borges's mentor. We'll be publishing an essay on him in the summer issue of The Quarterly Conversation, and Open Letter Press will be pubbing one of his novels, likely in 2009.

* For those who were less than surprised by who showed up on the NBCC "Good Reads" list they've now posted a "Fiction Also Rans" list that, to my eyes, is substantially more interesting

* A review of The Blue Fox, written by one of Bjork's collaborators:

Sjón’s poetic training tells. Most of the pages hold less than a paragraph, the observations are sparse and disconnected, and whilst perhaps it’s an obvious trick to leave so much blank space in a story dominated by snow, the effect of short chapters is a slowing of pace, not a Dan Brown-esque increase. Each word in its scarcity is loaded high with importance, so that your mode of reading changes and like the pastor tracking the fox, you pay close attention to every mark on the page.

* They're making a movie of Martin Amis's London Fields

* Wow. The Penguin wiki-novel bombed. Never woulda guessed . . .

* The Village Voice has a review of that recent theatrical production of The Sound and the Fury that doesn't subtract a single line from the book:

As in earlier ERS adventures, one's never sure whether the company means to act out the story, stylize it, take its elements apart, or even, conceivably, burlesque it. What the company thinks of Faulkner, what experience of his novel it wishes to convey, remain mysteries buried in the soft wax of its faintly campy, noncommittal style. Especially in an era that views black history very differently from educated Southerners of Faulkner's generation, the event carries a tinge of spoofing the Southern Gothic clichés that the novelist's less intense, less reflective successors exploited to exhaustion. What reverberated in my head as I came away wasn't anything ERS had done, but the classic line from Ronny Graham's merciless 1952 parody of Truman Capote: "Just then the old house gave another lurch as the termites finished the west wing."

* Harold Bloom continues to detract from his own reputation

* A documentary on the life of Mike Tyson will premiere at the Cannes Film Festoval

* Michel Houellebecq's mother has something to say