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Booklist copyeditor extraordinaire Eloise Kinney passed on an urgent news item: Craig Arnold, a poet (Shells, 1999) and university professor, is missing in Japan (“University Professor Missing for Several Days,” Laramie Boomerang). According to the university, Assistant Professor Craig Arnold, a faculty member in the Department of English, is in Japan through the U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission’s Creative [...]

In the Boston Globe (“What’s so funny?“), Alex Beam discusses the challenge of writing the comic novel: In the immortal deathbed phrase variously attributed to actors Edwin Booth, Edmund Kean, Donald Wolfit, and others: “Dying is easy, comedy is hard.” Comedy on the printed page may be the hardest of all. Writer Roy Blount Jr. [...]