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Two more interesting appreciations of J. G. Ballard. On Salon, Simon Reynolds considers “The unlimited dreams of J. G. Ballard“: But in death as in life, Ballard never quite got his full due as a thinker as well as a storyteller; he was a penetrating and endlessly provocative theorist about the intersections between culture and [...]

I’ve been following news about the White House’s new organic garden with interest. In a recent New York Times blog post , Deborah Needleman wrote: Michelle Obama’s rather basic kitchen garden comes loaded with politics and possibility. It can bring organic practices fully into the mainstream; it can teach children where food comes from and about nutrition and [...]

A couple of people passed along this link to an io9 post about the new Dean Koontz book, Relentless. A bad review must have really gotten under Dean Koontz‘s skin. His new book, Relentless, is about an evil book critic who gives a nice novelist a bad review — and then becomes a monster. The [...]

Greg Landgraf assembled this video, which was played at this morning’s memorial for Judith Krug. Well worth your while.

It’s Earth Day, the 39th Earth Day to be exact, and a good day to think about where books come from. The relationship between trees and reading has inspired an intriguing website, Eco-Libris, and a green mission. The Eco-Libris folks encourage us to plant a tree for each and every book we read. This makes reading [...]

The Pulitzer Prize winners were announced yesterday afternoon. They are: Fiction Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout (Random House) History The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, by Annette Gordon-Reed (Norton) Biography American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, by Jon Meacham (Random House) Poetry The Shadow of Sirius, by W. S. Merwin (Copper Canyon [...]

After paying some bills last night, I clicked “headlines” on my browser bar and saw that J. G. Ballard had died. There’s no shortage of news about this now, but as many of the obits seem to focus on his role as an influencer (see “Author J. G. Ballard dies after lengthy illness,” by Ben Hoyle, Times), [...]

In the Wall Street Journal, Stephen Marche has a nice piece on books that don’t exist (“Longing for Great Lost Works“)–not books that have been invented by authors for fictional purposes, but books that have been destroyed or lost forever. A poignant thought: Classical literature, like classical architecture, is a collection of delicious ruins. The [...]

Donna Seaman, in her Booklist review of the essay collection A Narrative Compass: Stories That Guide Women’s Lives, wrote: “In each elegant interpretation, the author traces the ripple effects of a story that thrilled or provoked her, a story that became a catalyst for a lifelong passion, and a story that became a virtual home, [...]

A post yesterday on Galleycat, about a bookstore‘s cancellation of Jayanti Tamm’s first public reading from Cartwheels in a Sari, made me think of a similar memoir, Kyria Abrahams’ I’m Perfect, You’re Doomed, which made me think of Kevin Roose’s The Unlikely Disciple–which, as luck would have it, was the subject of another recent Galleycat post. Coincidence–or [...]