The strange case of Marilee Jones, the MIT dean of admissions who lost her job last week when it was revealed that she had hidden a lie about her educational background for 28 years, just got a little stranger, or sadder, or something, as Publishers Weekly's online edition reports that her book about college admissions has been selling better since she resigned/was fired.

The book is "Less Stress, More Success: A New Approach to Guiding Your Teen Though College Admissions and Beyond," published by the American Academy of Pediatrics. It is still, apparently, a useful book. One wonders whether Jones's own experience, properly written about by her, might even make a useful coda to this book. Something about the tempations and fatal attractions of credentials of one kind or another. How many people have been tempted in this way, before, during, and after higher education or the military?

I used to have a job entitled, "Assistant to the Secretary of the University," at the University of Massachusetts. In putting together a resume later, I was tempted to make it "Assistant Secretary of the University." Just eliding the preposition and the definite article made it so much more impressive. And who would ever check? No, I didn't succumb. But I have in speech loosely referred to my "B.A," when the dark truth is that I have a "B.S." in English. The Suffolk University English Department would excuse you from the language requirement, but the dignified "A" would be replaced by the workaday "S," which might elicit sly joshing over what one did to earn one's degree.

Marilee Jones, whom I interviewed once for a Globe Magazine profile of former MIT president Charles Vest, is really a nice person, not more of a sinner than the rest of us. One hopes that from this fall she lands on her feet, no later than Don Imus inevitably will.

During a session Saturday afternoon at the Newburyport Literary Festival, novelist (and Marblehead resident) Julia Glass confessed that she was "the only high school student who truly loved 'Moby Dick'" and went on to share the titles of some favorite reads:

"Memoirs of a Geisha" by Arthur Golden. (There was a time, she said, that she didn't read bestsellers because she assumed they couldn't be very good, but this is one of the books that changed her mind on that score.)

"Pearl" by Mary Gordon. A mother who is a child of the '60s and raised a daughter on her own gets a call that her daughter is on a hunger strike in Dublin. "It raises provocative questions about being a parent,'' Glass said.

"Unless" by Carol Shields

Two novels that detail how people deal with loss:
"The Dogs of Babel'' by Carolyn Parkhurst
"Grief" by Andrew Holleran

"The City Of Your Final Destination" by (the underrated) Peter Cameron

"The Feast of Love" by Charles Baxter

"The Position" by Meg Wolitzer (a satire with great heart)

"Love Warps the Mind a Little" by John Dufresne

"A Disorder Peculiar to the Country" by Ken Kalfus (A very dark and very funny satire)

A nonfiction recommendation:
"Ultimate Punishment: A Lawyer's Reflections on Dealing with the Death Penalty" by Scott Turow (a short book that should be read by everyone who has ever debated capital punishment)

Tomorrow: Novelist Jennifer Haigh's reading recommendations

1 FANCY NANCY AND THE POSH PUPPY, by Jane O'Connor. Illustrated by Robin Preiss Glasser. (HarperCollins, $16.99.) What kind of dog is best for a fancy girl? (Ages 4 to 7)
2 THANKS TO YOU, by Julie Andrews Edwards and Emma Walton Hamilton. (HarperCollins, $14.99.) Wisdom from mothers and children, illustrated with family photos. (Ages 5 to 8)
3 FANCY NANCY, by Jane O'Connor. Illustrated by Robin Preiss Glasser. (HarperCollins, $15.99.) A girl takes her family out. (Ages 4 to 7)
4 SOMEDAY, by Alison McGhee. Illustrated by Peter H. Reynolds.. (Atheneum, $14.99.) A mother imagines her child's future. (Ages 4 to 8)
5 GHOST SHIP, by Mary Higgins Clark. Illustrated by Wendell Minor. (Wiseman/Simon & Schuster, $17.99.) In Cape Cod, Thomas meets the cabin boy of a ship that sailed 250 years ago. (Ages 6 to 10)

SOURCE: N.Y. Times, week of 4/29

1. Eat, Pray, Love
By Elizabeth Gilbert. Penguin.
2. Blink
By Malcolm Gladwell. Back Bay.
3. The Tipping Point
By Malcolm Gladwell. Back Bay.
4. 2006/07 Boston Restaurants
Edited by Ruth Tobias. Zagat Survey.
5. A Death in Belmont
By Sebastian Junger. Harper.
6. Stumbling on Happiness
By Daniel Gilbert. Vintage.
7. The Year of Magical Thinking
By Joan Didion. Vintage.
8. Three Cups of Tea
By Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. Penguin.
9. The Universe in a Single Atom
By the Dalai Lama. Morgan Road.
10. Porn for Women
By Cambridge Women’s Pornography Cooperative.!,Chronicle.

From Borders Books & Music, Brookline Booksmith, Concord Bookshop, Harvard Book Store, New England Mobile Book Fair, Newtonville Books, and Porter Square Books.

1. The Road
By Cormac McCarthy. Vintage.
2. Suite Française
By Irène Némirovsky. Vintage.
3. The Inheritance of Loss
By Kiran Desai. Grove.
4. Intuition
By Allegra Goodman. Dial.
5. The Memory Keeper’s Daughter
By Kim Edwards. Penguin.
6. Love Walked In
By Marisa de los Santos. Plume.
7. Water for Elephants
By Sara Gruen. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.
8. Everyman
By Philip Roth. Vintage.
9. Absurdistan
By Gary Shteyngart. Random House.
10. Blue Shoes and Happiness
By Alexander McCall Smith. Anchor.

From Borders Books & Music, Brookline Booksmith, Concord Bookshop, Harvard Book Store, New England Mobile Book Fair, Newtonville Books, and Porter Square Books.

1. Einstein
By Walter Isaacson. Simon & Schuster.
2. The Secret
By Rhonda Byrne. Beyond Words.
3. Big Papi
By David Ortiz. St. Martin’s.
4. How Doctors Think
By Jerome Groopman. Houghton Mifflin.
5. A Long Way Gone
By Ishmael Baeh. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
6. Better
By Atul Gawande. Metropolitan.
7. Where Have All the Leaders Gone?
By Lee Iacocca. Scribner.
8. The Life of Jews in Poland Before the Holocaust
By Ben-Zion Gold. University of Nebraska.
9. The Paths We Choose
By Sully Erna. Bartleby.
10. The Audacity of Hope
By Barack Obama. Crown.

From Borders Books & Music, Brookline Booksmith, Concord Bookshop, Harvard Book Store, New England Mobile Book Fair, Newtonville Books, and Porter Square Books.

1. The Children of Húrin
By J.R.R. Tolkien. Houghton Mifflin.
2. The Good Husband of Zebra Drive
By Alexander McCall Smith. Pantheon.
3. The Woods
By Harlan Coben. Dutton.
4. Nineteen Minutes
By Jodi Picoult. Atria.
5. I Heard That Song Before
By Mary Higgins Clark. Simon & Schuster.
6. Fresh Disasters
By Stuart Woods. Putnam.
7. The Blue Zone
By Andrew Gross. Morrow.
8. Boomsday
By Christopher Buckley. Twelve.
9. What Is the What
By Dave Eggers. McSweeney’s.
10. My French Whore
By Gene Wilder. St. Martin’s.

From Borders Books & Music, Brookline Booksmith, Concord Bookshop, Harvard Book Store, New England Mobile Book Fair, Newtonville Books, and Porter Square Books.

Mstislav Rostropovich, 1927-2007

In the bound liner-note pamphlet (that is my book angle here) to his recording of the six Bach concertos for unaccompanied cello, the Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, whose death was disclosed today, told an interviewer that he could not bring himself to imagine that musical giants such as Mozart and Bach were truly dead. "I prefer to think of them as dear friends who have left the room," he said.

I'll think that now about the man called Slava, whenever I listen to his recordings.

The editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution last week insisted the the paper would still cover the world of books, and still have book reviews, despite eliminating the position of book review editor. Nevertheless, the National Book Critics Circle is not mollified, and is continuing its campaign for a reversal of the decision.

The reviewers' organization is calling for a rally in front of the Journal-Constitution's office for next Thursday, May 3. It will be interesting to see how many readers will turn out. They care about books, but do they care about reviews?

Mystery Writers of America last night announced its Edgar Allan Poe Awards for the best works of mystery published in 2006:

Best Novel: "The Janissary Tree" by Jason Goodwin

Best First Novel by an American Author: "The Faithful Spy" by New York Times reporter Alex Berenson

Best Paperback Original: "Snakeskin Shamisen'' by Naomi Hirahara

Best Critical Book/Biography: "The Science of Sherlock Holmes: From Baskerville Hall to the Valley of Fear, the Real Forensics Behind the Great Detective's Greatest Cases'' by E.J. Wagner
(From her bio: "She and her husband live on Long Island in the custody of a large Labrador Retriever named Dr. Watson.'')

Best Fact Crime: "Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer" by James L. Swanson

Best Young Adult Mystery: "Buried" by Robin Merrow MacCready

Best Juvenile Mystery: "Room One: A Mystery or Two'' by Andrew Clements

Stephen King was honored as the Grand Master. And mystery maven (who knew?) Al Roker from the "Today Show" was the emcee at the 61st annual banquet awards in NYC.

Nobody waits a decent interval before spilling his guts, with the possible exception of Colin Powell. Today we learn that former presidential press secretary Scott McClellan has a contract for a book to be published next year, by PublicAffairs. According to the publisher's description, the book "will take readers behind-the-scenes of the Bush presidency, covering both strengths and weaknesses, successes and shortcomings with refreshing candor."

Even the president's bootblack is an insider, but we wonder what kind of analysis a press secretary could add to the burning issues of the last few years. McClellan's predecessor, Ari Fleischer, also penned a book, "Taking Heat," two years ago, which quickly sank from sight. Many will incline an ear toward a fly on the wall, but possibly people have skepticism about the insight, gravitas, and "refreshing candor" of a retired spin-doctor-in-chief.

Getting a glimpse of Charles Darwin's notebooks in the exhibit at the Museum of Science is really quite something. During his five-year voyage on the Beagle, he took copious notes and collected fossils and specimens everywhere he went. Yet later he wished he'd been even more exacting. When he collected specimens on the Galapagos Islands, he didn't note which island each specimen was from. He had assumed they'd all be alike.

In another case is a brightly colored drawing by his son, Francis. Darwin didn't believe in wasting paper. "The Battle of the Fruit & Vegetable'' was drawn on the back of a manuscript page from the "Origin of Species.'' It is one of 28 manuscript pages still known to exist.

If you want to see the exhibit, you have to hurry. It closes Friday.

By Judith Maas

SUNDAY: Jack Beatty reads from ‘‘Age of Betrayal,’’ at 3 p.m., at the Concord Bookshop, 65 Main St., Concord. ... Arrowsmith Press celebrates its fifth season from 3 to 5 p.m., at Lame Duck Books, 12 Arrow St., Cambridge. ... Poets Harris Gardner, Diana Der Hovannessian, and others read at 2 p.m., in Forsyth Chapel, Forest Hills Cemetery, 95 Forest Hills Ave. ($5) ... Poets Dan Tobin, Jeff Greene, and others read at 3 p.m., at the Concord Poetry Center, 40 Stow St., Concord.

MONDAY: Jack Beatty discusses ‘‘Age of Betrayal,’’ at 6 p.m., at the Brattle Theatre, 40 Brattle St., Cambridge ($5). ... Diana and Michael Preston discusss ‘‘Taj Majal,’’ at 7:30 p.m., at the Newton Free Library, 330 Homer St., Newton.

TUESDAY: Jack Beatty discusses ‘‘Age of Betrayal,’’ at 7 p.m., at the Framingham Public Library, 49 Lexington St., Framingham. ... Megan Marshall discusses ‘‘The Peabody Sisters,’’ at 7 p.m., at the Winchester Public Library, 80 Washington St., Winchester.

WEDNESDAY: Fred Pearce discusses ‘‘With Speed and Violence,’’ at 7:30 p.m., at First Parish Church, 3 Church St., Cambridge. ... Trisha Gura discusses ‘‘Lying in Weight,’’ at 7 p.m., at Borders Back Bay, 511 Boylston St. ... Nathan Englander discusses ‘‘The Ministry of Special Cases,’’ at 7 p.m., at Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard St., Brookline. ... Augustus Richard Norton discusses ‘‘Hezbollah,’’ at 7 p.m., at Barnes & Noble, Boston University, Kenmore Square. ... John De Vito and Frank Tropea discuss ‘‘The Immortal Marilyn,’’ at 6:30 p.m., at Fox Library, 175 Mass. Ave., Arlington. ... Michael Lowenthal reads from ‘‘Charity Girl,’’ at 7:30 p.m., at the Dover Town Library, 56 Dedham St., Dover. ... Poets Bill Coyle and Deborah Warren read at 7 p.m., at Porter Square Books, 25 White St., Cambridge.

THURSDAY: Howard Zinn discusses ‘‘A Young People’s History of the United States,’’ at 6 p.m., at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, 290 Harvard St., Brookline ($2). … Amy Dockser Marcus discusses ‘‘Jerusalem 1913,’’ at 7 p.m., at Borders Back Bay. ... Jon Clinch reads from ‘‘Finn,’’ at 7:30 p.m., at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newtonville. ... Dana Snyder-Grant discusses ‘‘Just Like Life, Only More So, and Other Stories of Illness,’’ at 7 p.m., at Flint Memorial Library, 147 Park St., N. Reading. ... Annie Choi reads from ‘‘Happy Birthday or Whatever,’’ at 7 p.m., at Barnes & Noble, Boston University. ... Lesley Dorman reads from ‘‘The Best Place to Be,’’ at 7 p.m., at Porter Square Books.

FRIDAY: Michael Chabon reads from ‘‘The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,’’ at 12:30 p.m., at Borders Back Bay. ... Don Cheadle and John Prendergast discuss ‘‘Not on Our Watch,’’ at 2 p.m., at the Kennedy Library, Columbia Point. ... Jon Clinch reads from ‘‘Finn,’’ at 7 p.m., at Jabberwocky Bookshop, 50 Water St., Newburyport. ... Ellen Cooney (‘‘A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies’’), Douglas Light (‘‘East Fifth Bliss’’), and poet Marc Widenshien read at 8 p.m., at Out of the Blue Gallery, 106 Prospect St., Cambridge. ... Scott Magoon discusses ‘‘Hugo and Miles in ‘I’ve Painted Everything,’’’ at 7 p.m., at Porter Square Books.

SATURDAY: Rose Madeline Mula signs ‘‘If These Are Laugh Lines, I’m Having Way Too Much Fun,’’ at noon, at Borders, 300 Boylston St., Chestnut Hill, and at 3 p.m., at Borders, 5 Wayside Rd., Burlington.

Events are subject to change.

[Colleague Mark Feeney offers this appreciation of author David Halberstam.]

David Halberstam, who died yesterday in a car crash in San Francisco, may or may not have been "the greatest journalist of his generation," as his onetime New York Times colleague Anthony Lewis told the Harvard Crimson. Certainly, he had the credentials: a Pulitzer Prize (for his Vietnam War coverage), a long shelf of best-selling books, and the contribution of an indispensable phrase to the language. That phrase came courtesy of what remains his most celebrated book, "The Best and the Brightest" (1972), about the high-powered policy intellectuals who helped mire the United States in Indochina.

It must be conceded that Halberstam, who was 73, also had a penchant for orotundity and a weakness for the sweeping statement. The latter could backfire on him. His book about Ford, "The Reckoning" (1987), practically read the last rites over the auto manufacturer. Yet it came out shortly after the company had introduced the Taurus, which eventually became the best-selling car model in the United States for much of the 1990s.

There's no question that Halberstam had the biggest shoulders in journalism. That was true literally. He was large, rawboned, Lincolnesque. The man had a great physical presence, one that extended all the way to his deep, rumbly voice. When he spoke, you couldn't help but pay attention, not least of all because his slow, solemn timbre conveyed the sense of someone who weighed each word and gave serious thought to what he had to say. (This is a much rarer quality, alas, than you might think.)

For all Halberstam's big-foot eminence, he never stopped answering his own phone and taking the time to field reporters’ questions. He may have been a famous author, but he remained a proud member of the fellowship of working journalists.

The last time I spoke with him was a year and a half ago for a profile I was doing of his friend Joan Didion. Having discussed her with great affection and eloquence, he immediately turned the conversation to Bob Woodward (I'd recently reviewed Woodward's book "The Secret Man" for The New York Observer). "What's gone wrong with him, do you think? All that access to power, it's as if he's gone over to the other side."

Halberstam did not shrink from the role of journalistic conscience: whether it be shaking his head over Woodward; inveighing against The New York Times' hiring William Safire as an op-ed columnist (Halberstam believed the former Nixon speechwriter was irredeemably tainted by his association with the president); or writing a very large book, "The Powers That Be" (1979), about the rise of such media giants as CBS, Time-Life, and the Times Mirror Corp.

The big shoulders were figurative, too, and not just in Halberstam's seeing himself as journalistic tribune. He wrote large (superlatives came as naturally to Halberstam as profanity does to David Mamet) and he wrote large about large subjects. Besides "The Best and the Brightest," "The Reckoning," and "The Powers That Be," he tackled an entire decade in "The Fifties" (1993) and U.S. peacekeeping in the former Yugoslavia in "War in a Time of Peace" (2001).

Inevitably, Halberstam will be compared to other eminent journalists who went on to become even more eminent authors, like Theodore H. White, say, or Robert A. Caro. Another name comes to mind, though: Graham Greene. It's not just the Vietnam connection or the fact that Halberstam, surprisingly enough, published two novels (his first book, "The Noblest Roman," 1961, and "One Very Hot Day," 1968).

Greene famously interspersed his more serious novels with what he called "entertainments," highly intelligent thrillers like "This Gun for Hire" or "Our Man in Havana." Halberstam did something similar. A passionate sports fan, he would alternate works on more substantial topics with such books as "The Breaks of the Game" (1981), about the NBA, "The Amateurs" (1985), about Olympic rowers, "Summer of '49" (1989), about the that season's pennant race between the Red Sox and Yankees, and "The Education of a Coach" (2005), about the Patriots' Bill Belichick. [See Globe sports columnist Bob Ryan's tribute here.]

These books were all extremely successful, in no small part because Halberstam didn't condescend to the material. He took Belichick or Joe DiMaggio every bit as seriously as he took Robert McNamara or Henry Luce. In fact, he would sometimes use his sports books as a way to get at much meatier tropics. "October 1964," about that year's World Series, was as much a meditation on race in America at the height of the Civil Rights movement as it was about baseball. Like Greene, Halberstam took a little-respected genre and brought real distinction to it.

-- Mark Feeney

Michael Thomas shares his favorite books in a new Great Writers podcast feature
(Globe staff photo by Suzanne Kreiter)

Whenever an aspiring author asks a successful one for advice, the answer is invariably: "Read."

But read what?

To help answer that question, the Globe's Great Writers podcast has been asking our participating authors to recommend the great books they've been reading lately. We're calling the new feature "Top of the Stack" - as in the books that have earned exulted status amid that pile next to their favorite reading chair.

The first installment of the new feature is already live online. We're also offering a recap and links here for those seeking more information.

Lionel Shriver, the author of the best selling book "We Need to Talk About Kevin," read last month from her new novel "The Post-Birthday World." She recommended:

"Intiution", by Allegra Goodman"
"Revolutionary Road" by Richard Yates, and
"Atonement" by Ian McEwan

Michael Thomas, the Newton native who recently published the acclaimed novel "Man Gone Down," included a collection by poet Yusef Komunyakaa among his recommendations. They were:

"Just Above My Head" by James Baldwin
"Four Quartets" by T.S. Eliot, and
"Taboo" by Yosef Komunyakaa.

Finally, Pagan Kennedy, the author of the fascinating transsexual surgical history "The First Man-Made Man," recommended:

"The Year of Magical Thinking" by Joan Didion,
"The Midnight Disease" by Alice Flaherty, and
"His Brother's Keeper" by Jonathan Weiner.

We'll bring you more recommendations as the series moves along. The next episode of Great Writers will feature Erica Wagner, literary editor for The Times of London, reading and discussing her new novel "Seizure" at Newtonville Books.

The 200-plus people Carl Bernstein interviewed for his upcoming book, "A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Clinton," did not include the subject. Alfred A. Knopf publicity chief Paul Bogaards left word late yesterday that Bernstein did not interview Sen. Clinton "on the record, though he has had casual conversations with Sen. Clinton through the years. My understanding is that Sen. Clinton made a decision not to cooperate with any book author."

I.e., one of the things she is in charge of is her own words on the subject of herself.

Carl Bernstein's 640-page book about Hillary Clinton, "A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Clinton," will hit bookstores June 19, according to an announcement today by Alfred A. Knopf, part of the Random House empire. She's not in charge yet, of course, but perhaps the title is meant to suggest that she is a take-charge woman.

Bernstein, bookwise the less prolific half of the Woodward & Bernstein duo that helped bring down Richard Nixon, has been working on the book for eight years. It's described as a biography "that covers her life up through her decision to run for president," and will have a first printing of 350,000 copies.

Though the announcement says Bernstein interviewed more than 200 people, "including friends, colleagues, and adversaries" of the senator, and will tell us just about everything we want to know about her, it does not claim much if any access to the subject herself.

We're curious: Did he not ask to talk to her? Or did she decline? Waiting for an answer from Knopf on this. Either way, the positive point is that it's not an "authorized" biography.

MIT Press has published "WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution,'' the doorstop-sized catalog for a new exhibit out in LA of feminist art.

In 512 pages it provides a rich history of women artists, but what's getting all the attention is the cover (see it here) with a couple dozen slim, naked women. (The work of art is Martha Rosler's "Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain: Hot House, or Harem,'' 1966-72 and it's shown in full in a centerspread inside.)

Scroll down below the cover for a heated discussion about its merits. Is the cover feminist or anti-feminist? Is it empowering or exploitative?

New York Times art critic Holland Carter weighed in, writing in his review of the international exhibit that the catalog cover "needs rethinking. Martha Rosler's sardonic collage of Playboy centerfold nudes loses its point out of context and turns into just another sex-sells pitch.''

His comment raised the ire of Lorraine Wild,who designed the cover with a colleague. She rebuts Carter's view in her March 9 post.

Whatever side you're on -- if you're even taking sides -- the back-and-forth is invigorating. And if you want to see the exhibit for youself, it arrives in Washington, D.C., this fall and in New York early in 2008.

Debby Applegate, who last week won a Pulitzer for "The Most Famous Man in America,'' her biography of Henry Ward Beecher, spoke wistfully in Cambridge last night about the man who has captivated her imagination for 20 years.

When asked what her next book might be, she acknowledged how tough it might be to find a character as quirky, fiery, and fascinating as Beecher. "You have to fall in love with a character'' if you're going to write a biography, she said. "If you've had a really good 'boyfriend,' it's even harder to find the next one."

(Applegate, in town to accept an award from the Unitarian Universalist Association, noted tht Beecher's father, Lyman, despised Unitarians and once said that he could rout the Unitarians out of Boston "roots and all'' in two years.)

After making Beecher the subject of her senior thesis at Amherst College and her doctoral dissertation at Yale, Applegate signed a contract in 1998 to write a book about him. She expected it to take a year and a half.

Needless to say, searching for a "smoking gun'' that would settle the question of whether Beecher, a minister, did in fact have an affair with a parishioner took a lot longer than she expected.

When the contract was signed, Doubleday, the publisher, thought the timing of Applegate's book would be perfect, what with the Clinton-Lewinsky affair in the news and all. She missed that news cycle but the affairs keep coming.

Kahani, an ad-free literary magazine directed mainly (though not exclusively) at children of South Asian background (See an article about it here), published on a shoestring in Newton, has received a 2007 Parents' Choice Approved Award. The award is given by the Parents' Choice Foundation, a nonprofit group that rates media for children. Kahani means story in Hindi.

Albert Murray, the novelist, poet, and cultural critic, has been awarded the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal by Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, it was announced today. Murray, who is 90, is the author of many books. Institute director Henry Louis Gates Jr. said in a statement, "We present Albert Murray with the Du Bois Medal today to let him know that his life's work is not only valued, but also recognized as vital and central to our intellectual and artistic tradition."

Murray not only wrote of the century in which he lived most of his life, but lived it with many of its greatest names, who were his friends: Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Romare Bearden, Robert Penn Warren, Duke Ellington, and many others. My colleague Mark Feeney wrote a memorable profile of Murray in the Globe August 1, 1993, which was included in Roberta S. Maguire's anthology, "Conversations with Albert Murray" (University of Mississippi Press, 2000). From Mark's piece:

"Albert Murray is 'what a man of letters should and could be,' says the novelist John Edgar Wideman. 'He represents the best in thought and writing.' Walker Percy speculated that Murray's essay collection, The Omni-Americans, published in 1970, 'well may be the most important book on black-white relations in the United States, indeed on American culture, published in this generation.' Or there is what Ellington wrote about his friend 20 years ago, when Murray's first novel, Train Whistle Guitar, was published: 'He doesn't have to look it up. . . . If you want to know, look him up. He is the unsquarest person I know.' Short of having the pope call you the holiest person he knows, it's hard to imagine a more authoritative order of praise."

In response to the outcry raised by John Freeman, president of the National Book Critics Circle, over the elimination of the book-editor position at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the paper's editor, Julia Wallace, sent this email to Freeman and others:

"Thank you for your thoughtful note about our book coverage. Let me allay your fears: We are not killing our book coverage or book pages. So long as books are important to our readers, we will continue to dedicate space to them. Remember, this is the newspaper of Margaret Mitchell and Hank Klibanoff, a Pulitzer winner this year for his book on how the press covered the civil rights movement. Our own literary roots are deep, and we won’t forget that.

"Perhaps we have created some confusion as a byproduct of our newsroom restructuring. As you may have heard, we are implementing many changes in the way we gather and display our content in the newspaper and on our website. The point of this restructuring is to even better align our coverage with the interests of our readers. In the restructuring, many jobs are changing -– some are being eliminated. Our staffers are currently being asked to apply for the newly defined jobs. All will have jobs when this is completed. While we will no longer have a book editor, we will have an editor responsible for directing our book coverage. We won’t have a metro editor or food editor in the traditional sense either, but we will still cover local news and food with a vengeance. None of these changes means we’re planning to end our coverage of topics readers love -– far from it. We believe our newspaper readers want an engaging and sophisticated report on new books and that they want to read more about the local literary community and the fascinating people who populate it. We will be using freelancers, established news services and our staff to provide stories about books of interest to our readers and the local literary community. All this should shake out over the next few months...."

John Freeman, president of the National Book Critics Circle, notes that the Atlanta Journal Constitution has eliminated the job of book editor Teresa Weaver. It's not clear, Freeman says, what the fate of the book section will be -- it's hard to imagine elimination of all book reviews -- and Weaver has been invited to apply for another position. It's dispiriting, nevertheless, that a major newspaper would regard the position of book editor as expendable. We're supposed to be about reading, not just looking.

Neat timing on the part of the Unitarian Universalist Association, which this Sunday is giving a book award to Debby Applegate, who won a Pulitzer Prize Monday for "The Most Famous Man in America,'' her biography of Henry Ward Beecher. The brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, he was the most famous preacher of the nineteenth century until, in 1872, he was accused of seducing his best friend's wife.

Applegate learned of Henry Ward Beecher when, as a student at Amherst College, she was asked to put together a display of notorious but forgotten alumni. She became hooked on him, wrote her senior thesis about him, and stuck with him for her Ph.D. in American studies at Yale.

She will read, answer questions, and sign her book (now out in paperback) Sunday, April 22, at 7:30 p.m. at First Parish Church in Cambridge (0 Church St. in Harvard Square).

The UUA award is given annually to the book judged to be the most significant contribution to religious liberalism.

Nonfiction
1. Eat, Pray, Love
By Elizabeth Gilbert. Penguin.
2. The Year of Magical Thinking
By Joan Didion. Vintage.
3. Blink
By Malcolm Gladwell. Back Bay.
4. Top 10: Boston
DK Travel.
5. 2006/07 Boston Restaurants
Edited by Ruth Tobias. Zagat Survey.
6. The Tipping Point
By Malcolm Gladwell. Back Bay.
7. Dreams From My Father
By Barack Obama. Three Rivers.
8. Three Cups of Tea
By Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. Penguin.
9. A Death in Belmont
By Sebastian Junger. Harper.
10. Frommer’s Boston Day by Day
By Marie Morris. Wiley.

From Borders Books & Music, Brookline Booksmith, Concord Bookshop, Harvard Book Store, New England Mobile Book Fair, Newtonville Books, and Porter Square Books.

Fiction
1. The Road
By Cormac McCarthy. Vintage.
2. The Inheritance of Loss
By Kiran Desai. Grove.
3. The Memory Keeper’s Daughter
By Kim Edwards. Penguin.
4. Intuition
By Allegra Goodman. Dial.
5. Absurdistan
By Gary Shteyngart. Random House.
6. Saving Fish From Drowning
By Amy Tan. Ballantine.
7. Love Walked In
By Marisa de los Santos. Plume.
8. The Kite Runner
By Khaled Hosseini. Riverhead.
9. The Namesake
By Jhumpa Lahiri. Mariner.
10. In the Time of the Butterflies
By Julia Alvarez. Plume.

From Borders Books & Music, Brookline Booksmith, Concord Bookshop, Harvard Book Store, New England Mobile Book Fair, Newtonville Books, and Porter Square Books.

Nonfiction
1. A Long Way Gone
By Ishmael Baeh. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
2. The Secret
By Rhonda Byrne. Beyond Words.
3. Grace (Eventually)
By Anne Lamott. Riverhead.
4. Better
By Atul Gawande. Metropolitan.
5. How Doctors Think
By Jerome Groopman. Houghton Mifflin.
6. Everyday Pasta
By Giada De Laurentiis. Clarkson Potter.
7. The New American Story
By Bill Bradley. Random House.
8. Women and Money
By Suze Orman. Spiegel & Grau.
9. I Feel Bad About My Neck
By Nora Ephron. Knopf.
10. In an Instant
By Lee and Bob Woodruff. Random House.

From Borders Books & Music, Brookline Booksmith, Concord Bookshop, Harvard Book Store, New England Mobile Book Fair, Newtonville Books, and Porter Square Books.

Fiction
1. Nineteen Minutes
By Jodi Picoult. Atria.
2. What Is the What
By Dave Eggers. McSweeney’s.
3. Suite Française
By Irène Némirovsky. Knopf.
4. I Heard That Song Before
By Mary Higgins Clark. Simon & Schuster.
5. The Reluctant Fundamentalist
By Mohsin Hamid. Harcourt.
6. Shopaholic and Baby
By Sophie Kinsella. Dial.
7. Water for Elephants
By Sara Gruen. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.
8. Whitethorn Woods
By Maeve Binchy. Knopf.
9. Heart-Shaped Box
By Joe Hill. Morrow.
10. Make Way for Ducklings
By Robert McCloskey. Viking.

From Borders Books & Music, Brookline Booksmith, Concord Bookshop, Harvard Book Store, New England Mobile Book Fair, Newtonville Books, and Porter Square Books.

SUNDAY: A panel discussion on ‘‘An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature’’ takes place at 3 p.m., in Fulton Hall, Boston College, Chestnut Hill. ... Debby Applegate discusses ‘‘The Most Famous Man in America: The B,’’ her biography of Henry Ward Beecher,’’ at 7:30 p.m., at First Parish Church, 3 Church St., Cambridge. ... Susie Davidson reads from her Holocaust book, ‘‘I Refused to Die,’’ at 2 p.m., at the Morse Institute Library, 14 E. Central St., Natick.

MONDAY: Walter Isaacson discusses ‘‘Einstein,’’ at 6 p.m., at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, 290 Harvard St., Brookline ($2). ... Poets Philip Nikolayev and Hadara Bar-Nadav read at 8 p.m., at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, 56 Brattle St., Cambridge ($3). ... A.M. Homes reads from ‘‘The Mistress’s Daughter,’’ at 6 p.m., at the Brattle Theatre, 40 Brattle St., Cambridge ($5). ... Zachary Leader discusses ‘‘The Life of Kingsley Amis,’’ at 7 p.m., at the Harvard Square Coop, Cambridge. ... Poet Geoffrey O’Brien and Ben Lerner read at 5:30 p.m., in Lamont Library, Harvard University, Cambridge.

TUESDAY: John and Martha McPhee discuss ‘‘Uncommon Carriers’’ and ‘‘L’America,’’ at 6:30 p.m., at First Parish Church, Cambridge ($5). ... Sheila Kohler discusses ‘‘Bluebird, or the Invention of Happiness,’’ at 7 p.m., at Porter Square Books, 25 White St., Cambridge. ... Erica Wagner discusses ‘‘Seizure,’’ at 7:30 p.m., at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newtonville. ... Walter Isaacson signs ‘‘Einstein,’’ at 7:15 p.m., at the Harvard Square Coop, Cambridge. ... Moira Linehancq reads from ‘‘If No Moon,’’ at 7 p.m., at the Winchester Public Library, 80 Washington St., Winchester. ... Joyce Antler reads from ‘‘You Never Call, You Never Write,’’ at 7 p.m., at Brookline Booksmith. ... Children’s author Tony Di Terlizzi speaks at 7:30 p.m., in Vanderslice Hall, Boston College, Chestnut Hill ($15).

WEDNESDAY: Reverend Billy reads from ‘‘What Would Jesus Buy?,’’ at 7 p.m., at Porter Square Books. ... Jonathan Cohn discusses ‘‘Sick,’’ at 6:30 p.m., at the Harvard Book Store, 1256 Mass. Ave., Cambridge. ... Chet Raymo discusses ‘‘Valentine,’’ at 7 p.m., at the Hingham Public Library, 66 Leavitt St., Hingham. ... Thalassa Ali discusses ‘‘Companions of Paradise,’’ at 7 p.m., at the Harvard Square Coop, Cambridge. ... Kevin Weeks and Phyllis Karas discuss ‘‘Brutal,’’ at 12:30 p.m., at Borders Back Bay, 511 Boylston St.

THURSDAY: Heather Cox Richardson discusses ‘‘West From Appomattox,’’ at 7 p.m., at Book Ends, 559 Main St., Winchester. ... Lucy McCauley discusses ‘‘Best Women’s Travel Writing 2007,’’ at 7 p.m., at Porter Square Books. ... J.D. Scrimgeour discusses ‘‘Themes for English B,’’ at 7 p.m., at the Flint Memorial Library, 147 Park St., N. Reading. ... Daniel Kimmel discusses ‘‘The Dream Team,’’ at 7 p.m., at Barnes & Noble, Boston University, Kenmore Square. ... Richard J. Ward reads from ‘‘Grampas Are for All Seasons,’’ at 7 p.m., at the Harvard Club, 374 Comm. Ave; call 617-536-1260 for reservations. ... Granta winners Olga Grushin, Uzodinma Iweala, and Akhil Sharma speak at 7 p.m., at the Harvard Square Coop. ... Susie Davidson discusses ‘‘I Refused to Die,’’ at 7 p.m., at the Maynard Public Library, 77 Nason St., Maynard. ... Myriam Cyr reads from ‘‘Letters of a Portuguese Nun,’’ at 7 p.m., at the Book Rack, 52 State St., Newburyport. ... I rish poet Peter Fallon reads at 4 p.m., in the Healey Library, UMass-Boston, 100 Morrissey Blvd. ...Arthur Phillips reads from "Angelica," at 6:30 p.m., at the Harvard Book Store.

FRIDAY: Harry Gelber discusses ‘‘The Dragon and the Foreign Devils,’’ at 3 p.m., at the Harvard Book Store. ... Hanne Blank discusses ‘‘Virgin,’’ at 6:30 p.m., at the Harvard Book Store. ... The second annual Newburyport Literary Festival begins; for complete festival information, visit www.newburyportliteraryfestival.org ... Children’s author Carlyn Beccia reads at 4 p.m., at the Concord Bookshop, 65 Main St., Concord. ... John Holland discuses ‘‘Power of the Soul,’’ at 7 p.m., at Jabberwocky Bookshop, 50 Water St., Newburyport. ... Brian Malloy reads from "Brendan Wolf," at 7 p.m., at Calamus Bookstore, 92B South St.

Events are subject to change.

Any serious student of the American Civil War will delve into the 127 volumes of "The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies," published by the U.S. War Department in 1880. Many libraries have these books, arranged in long dusty lines, and they're also online. Much of the content consists of orders; that is, when a brigadier general was ordered to move forces in the line of battle, he would write an order to a regimental commander and a courier would gallop off on his horse, and the order in most cases was preserved.

It's safe to say that the general's order would not normally contain a sentence such as, "that knucklehead Grant wants this. I think it's asinine, but I guess we have no choice." People have always understood that to write something down, whether in war or peace, official or personal, was to take a risk.

I was reminded of this by my colleague Peter Canellos's thoughtful column this morning about the email accounts used by Bush administration officials. Numerous insiders, including Karl Rove, often used their Republican National Committee email accounts, rather than government accounts, and millions of emails were deleted in the process, possibly in violation of the Presidential Records Act. Noting that most people, even in the White House, also use email for strictly personal purposes, Canellos writes that there ought to be some reasonable compromise between the need to save official communications and government employees' right to have private conversations.

The point raises, not for the first time, the question of what exactly email is. Most people think of email (even more so "IMs" -- instant messages) as something like a telephone call, or even an in-person conversation, not as "writing" in the traditional sense. Even though they use a keyboard, and write sentences, and might even begin with "Dear So-and-so," and end with "sincerely yours," they do not think of emails as documents, apparently because usually no paper is involved.

We should rethink this assumption. Since it seems that emails are preserved in the innards of the computer universe, we should think of them exactly as we would a letter, whether we hit the delete-button or not. It would make us think before we write, and avoid all kinds of misfortune and embarrassment. The death of the personal letter is much lamented, but clearly reports of its demise, as with Mark Twain's famous telegram about his obituary, are greatly exaggerated.

The 2007 Pulitzer Prizes were announced this afternoon and the fiction winner is Oprah's current pick:

FICTION "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy (Alfred A. Knopf)
DRAMA "Rabbit Hole" by David Lindsay-Abaire
HISTORY "The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation" by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff (Alfred A. Knopf)
BIOGRAPHY OR AUTOBIOGRAPHY "The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher" by Debby Applegate (Doubleday)
POETRY "Native Guard" by Natasha Trethewey (Houghton Mifflin)
GENERAL NON-FICTION "The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright" (Alfred A. Knopf)

The much-anticipated auction of the O.J. Simpson book, "If I Did It," scheduled for tomorrow, was cancelled when the rightsholder, Lorraine Brooke Associates, Friday filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Florida. A chapter 11 filing stops the auction because a debtor's assets must be retained pending a reorganization plan, approved by the court, which would meet creditors' claims.

The controversial book about the 1994 murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman, which Simpson insisted was hypothetical and not a confession (he was acquitted of the murders in 1995), wrecked the career of editor Judith Regan after publisher HarperCollins cancelled the book and fired her last December. Lorraine Brooke, according to court statements by O.J. Simpson's lawyer, is owned by his children.

A Los Angeles judge Friday ruled that any receipts from the auction, and profits from the book, should go to Goldman's family, which won a $33 million wrongful death suit against the former football star, and not to Simpson's children. It's not clear that Lorraine Brooke Associates has any other creditor besides the Goldman family, which might mean that unless the book is destroyed, the Goldman family might still be be able to claim the profits eventually.

Poetry via pod? It's here. A nonprofit group called the Student Publishing Program has gotten together with a company called potcastGO.com to make poetry and poetry-related programming available beginning this month, which is National Poetry Month.

Starting today, there will be five new programs a week for the next 10 weeks. Samples include a question-and-answer connection with poet laureate Donald Hall, and a poetry contest for teens. There will also be the Greatest Living Poets program, with readings by poets and even writing advice from them to aspiring poets.

In a chat over at Boston.com, Gary Shteyngart, whose novel "Absurdistan,'' was named one of the 10 best books of 2006 by the New York Times, proclaimed himself a "disciple of Fat Man Fiction,'' from Rabelais to Oblomov to his favorite American book of the past 25 years, "A Confederacy of Dunces'' by John Kennedy Toole.

Shteyngart lives in New York but comes to Boston often to visit his girlfriend. He's wild about the ribs at Redbones and will be speaking at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge tonight about his novel, now out in paperback.

The four winners of the 2006 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, for the best book on race, were announced yesterday by the Cleveland Foundation, and one of the winners is Cambridge-based poet Martha Collins, for her book of poetry, "Blue Front." Collins, who teaches at Oberlin College and spends part of the year there, was the founder of the creative writing program at UMass/Boston. The other winners were novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, historian Scott Reynolds Nelson, and journalist Taylor Branch.

The problem with an award for lifetime achievement is that it's always about the usual suspects -- there's never any surprise or suspense. For example, there's the Man-Booker International Prize nominees, announced today. Separate from the Man-Booker Prize for Fiction, the international prize, inaugurated in 2005, is open to all authors who write in English, and is for overall achievement, not a single book. The prize is 60,000 pounds, or about $119,000. The 15 nominees, most of whom you will have heard of: Salman Rushdie, Doris Lessing, Ian McEwan, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Chinua Achebe, John Banville, Peter Carey, Carlos Fuentes, Amos Oz, Michel Tournier, and Harry Mulisch. The winner will be chosen in June, in Toronto.

The Bookseller, Britain's online book-news site, today announced the winner of my favorite book prize, the "Diagram Prize for the Oddest Book Title of the Year." The winner is "The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification," by Julian Montague, published by Harry N. Abrams. The runner-up was "Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan." This year's winner joins the other memorable winners of yesteryear in the oddness pantheon, such as the scatalogical classic (in 1989) "How to [expletive deleted] in the Woods: An Environmentally Sound Approach to a Lost Art," "Proceedings of the Second Annual Workshop on Nude Mice," and the feminist page-turner, "The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories." There'll always be an England, thank God.

...Robert Fagles's new translation of Virgil's "Aeneid," but it has been going slowly. The poetry is beautiful. Nevertheless, something about it is discomfiting. The ancients did not sanitize war, as we tend to do, and with all that's going on in Iraq, I'm not in the mood for some of the poem's narrative. Opening the book at random to a page in Book 10 (which I have not yet come to in my reading), there is this typical passage:

"...Now up steps
Clausus from Cures, flushed with his young strength
and flings his burly spear from a distance, hitting Dryops
under the chin full force to choke the Trojan's throat
as he shouted, cutting off both his voice and his life
in the same breath, and his brow slams the ground
as he vomits clots of blood...."

A friend of mine, who sees the war in Iraq as the central front of the war on terror, recently said to me, in dismissing objections to the NSA eavesdropping program, "This is wartime." Of course, it's not that he thinks people don't know that there's a war going on. What he meant was that our minds and priorities and intentions should be different in wartime than in peacetime. For one thing, we can't be dwelling on the evisceration of humanity. We're supposed to be resolute and to block those things out, keep our eyes on the prize, as men charging the enemy across the battlefield block out what is happening to their comrades to the left and right. When the Globe or the Times put bloody photographs of dead or dying soldiers on page 1, we get angry complaints from readers who object to that frankness, who don't want their faces rubbed in the reality of war.

Last week, I visited for the first time the new World War II memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C., built in 2004 just west of the Washington Monument. Many art and architecture critics hate this edifice, which is circular, with 50 identical granite posts for every state, a triumphant arch at opposite ends (marked "Pacific" and "Atlantic"), and a pleasant fountain in the center. The names of various battles are carved on the respective ends, along with stirring quotes. At one side is a wall with 4,000 neatly mounted gold stars, each representing 100 of the approximately 400,000 Americans killed between 1941 and 1945.

It was a warm and sunny day. The Cherry Blossom Festival was going on, and throngs of people filled the center of the memorial, which made me think of St. Peter's Square in Rome. On the side opposite the wall of stars, a succession of high school bands filled portable chairs, playing patriotic music. It was a happy scene.

As I said, many architects and others hate this memorial, even likening it to the vulgar and massive styles of Soviet or Fascist monuments. I did not have that reaction, since I believe that war memorials are about the people who erect them as much as about those they honor. And this memorial expresses perfectly how most people today feel about World War II. Nothing awkward or misshapen or messy about it. Everything clean and neat and symmetrical and heart-stirring and rational. It makes us feel good about the war, and ourselves.

Part of me thinks it would be truer if there were a few lifesize bronze figures scattered randomly around, like Dryops with the spear protruding from his throat and the bloody vomit rushing out. But I know that is unthinkable. It would be too upsetting. It would make people think about death and waste, when they're supposed to be thinking about wartime.

What's the old saying: We don't appreciate what we have until it's gone?

Well, today that's true about Kurt Vonnegut, the wonderfully inventive novelist who died yesterday (and who is fondly remembered by a former student, Globe staffer Joseph Kahn, in an item below). Vonnegut's best work is decades old, of course, but death does focus the mind.

Amazon.com reports that sales of his books are soaring. As of midafternoon, Vonnegut held seven of the top ten slots on Amazon's "Movers and Shakers" list, which tracks sales trends over 24 hours.

All of which makes you wonder: Why don't we pay more attention to great writers when they're still with us?

Somehow, Alex Heard's charges in The New Republic (referenced a couple of weeks back on this site) that humorist David Sedaris is too creative in embellishing his nonfiction have made nary a ripple in publishing and the mainstream press.

And yet, as is usually the case with such charges unless and until they're proven wrong, they haven't gone away. Now Jack Shafer at Slate takes another look at the controversy in a smart and thoughtful essay that makes some telling points. Here's the link.

SUNDAY: The Annual Boston Poetry Month Festival takes place from 1 to 4:45 p.m., at the Boston Public Library, Copley Square … John Hanson Mitchell reads from “The Rose Café,” at 3 p.m., at the Concord Bookshop, 65 Main St., Concord … Susie Davidson discusses her Holocaust book “I Refused to Die,” at 7 p.m., at Congregation Or Atid, 97 Concord Rd., Wayland … Clint Richmond discusses “Political Places of Boston,” at 2 p.m., at the Dorchester Historical Society, William Clapp House, 195 Boston St.

MONDAY: Lucinda Franks discusses “My Father’s Secret War,” at 7 p.m., at the Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard St., Brookline … Gary Shteyngart reads from “Absurdistan,” at 6 p.m., at the Brattle Theatre, 40 Brattle St., Cambridge ($5) … Gene Wilder signs “My French Whore,” at 7 p.m., at Borders Back Bay, 511 Boylston St.

TUESDAY: Jonathan Wilson discusses “Marc Chagall,” at 6:30 p.m., at the Harvard Book Store, 1256 Mass. Ave., Cambridge … Lucinda Franks discusses “My Father’s Secret War,” at 7 p.m., at Borders Back Bay … Dani Shapiro reads from “Black & White,” at 7 p.m., at the Brookline Booksmith … Liz Benedict and Neil Connolly discuss “In the Kennedy Kitchen,” at 7 p.m., at Porter Square Books, 25 White St., Cambridge … Kevin Sessums reads from “Mississippi Sissy,” at 7:30 p.m., at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newtonville … John Clinch reads from “Finn,” at 5:30 p.m., in Marsh Chapel, Boston University, 735 Comm. Ave.

WEDNESDAY: Poet John Hodgen reads at 7 p.m., at Porter Square Books … Abner Shimony discusses Martin Eger’s “Science, Understanding, and Justice,” at 7 p.m., at Barnes & Noble, Boston University, Kenmore Square … Mohsin Hamid discusses “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” at 6:30 p.m., at the Harvard Book Store … Marc Estrin and Martha Nussbaum discuss “Golem Song,” at 7:30 p.m., at the Harvard Square Coop, Cambridge … Jay Kopelman discusses “From Baghdad with Love,” at 7 p.m., at the Massachusetts School of Law, Woodland Park, 500 Federal St., Andover … Dan Mathews discusses “Committed,” at 12:30 p.m., at Borders Downtown Crossing, 10-24 School St. … Poets Chelsea Rathburn and Len Krisak read at 7:30 p.m., at the Newburyport Art Association Gallery, 65 Water St., Newburyport.

THURSDAY: Porter Square Books sponsors Alexander McCall-Smith reading from “Good Husband of Zebra Drive,” at 7 p.m., at the Masonic Temple, 1950 Mass. Ave., Cambridge … Wayne Johnston discusses “Custodian of Paradise,” at 7:30 p.m., at Newtonville Books … H. Bruce Franklin moderates a panel on prison writing at 7:30 p.m., at First Parish Church, 3 Church St., Cambridge … Ben Greenman reads from “A Circle Is a Balloon and a Compass Both,” at 7 p.m., at the Brookline Booksmith … Stephen Puleo discusses “Dark Tide,” at 7:30 p.m., at the Jenks Senior Center, 109 Skillings Rd., Winchester … Ric Wasley discusses “Shadow of Innocence,” at 7 p.m., at the Harvard Square Coop … Tara Lengsfelder and Eliezer J. Sternberg discuss “Dancing in the Rain” and “Are You a Machine?,” at 4 p.m., in the Gosman Sports Center, Brandeis University, 415 South St., Waltham.

FRIDAY: Tatyana Tolstaya reads from “The Slynx and White Walls,” at 3 p.m., at the Harvard Bookstore … Susie Davidson discusses “I Refused to Die,” at 1 p.m., at Hebrew Senior Life, 1550 Beacon St., Brookline … Kevin Sessums reads from “Mississippi Sissy,” at 7 p.m., at Calamus Bookstore, 92B South St.

SATURDAY: Senator John Kerry and Teresa Heinz Kerry discuss “This Moment on Earth,” at noon, at Memorial Church, Harvard Yard ($5); tickets available from the Harvard Book Store … Kevin Weeks and Phyllis Karas sign “Brutal,” at 2 p.m., at Borders, 6 Wayside Road, Burlington.

Events are subject to change.

By Joseph P. Kahn

"Vonnegut Has 15 Nuggets of Talent in Harvard Class" went the headline over the New York Times story published on Nov. 19, 1970. I remember the story well. For I was among the 15 "nuggets" who'd lucked into a writing seminar with the famous author, whose novel "Slaughterhouse-Five" sat atop the Times bestseller list and who had already progressed from cult novelist to counterculture icon and commercial powerhouse.

The story behind our selection -- perhaps apocryphal, in any case not reported by the Times -- was that Vonnegut had gathered all 215 submissions, threw them down a staircase, and scooped up the first 15 that caught his eye. That's not what Vonnegut said for the record, anyway. Only 15 submissions, which included seven novel-length manuscripts, were "really good ones," he said, while the rest "ranged from mediocre to worse."

He also said the main thing students had to learn was "how to keep a reader reading. If they do not learn that they are finished."

I have no memory of what story I submitted, only that it was not a full-length novel and almost certainly unpublishable, however kind Vonnegut was to say otherwise. For the record, Vonnegut was a wonderful and thoughtful teacher, generous with his time and comments and supportive of any ambition, however foolish, to make a living in the writing game.

At 48, unstuck in time between two marriages and battling recurrent bouts of depression, Vonnegut himself was hardly finished when he came to Harvard for a semester, though his most fertile years as a novelist were mostly behind him.

Between 1952 and 1969 he wrote "Player Piano," "The Sirens of Titan," "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater," "Mother Night, "Cat's Cradle," and "Slaughterhouse-Five," the latter a fictionalized account of the Dresden firebombing by US forces, which he witnessed firsthand. (As an Allied target, he later wrote, Dresden was "about as sinister as a wedding cake.") A remarkable output by any measure -- my personal favorites are "Sirens" and "Cat's Cradle" -- but one that also stamped Vonnegut as a serious writer a la Joseph Heller and John Barth, not merely a crafter of science-fiction flavored comedies. "Slaughterhouse Five" would later rank No. 18 on the Modern Library list of the 100 best English-language books of the 20th Century. He never topped it, one might fairly say, but neither did he abandon its central themes: the folly of war, the abject helplessness of the human condition, and so on.

Did he resent the fact that we wasn't taken more seriously, both earlier and later in his career?

"A lot of critics are fastidious about me because my provenance is so scruffy," he told The Washington Post's Bob Thompson in 2005. "No, I'm not a Knopf author. No, I wasn't in The New Yorker. And on and on...." Then he told a Martians-land-in-Manhattan joke and ripped into the Washington political establishment.

God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut.

I did not keep in touch with my old writing teacher much post-Harvard. But in 1972, when I was struggling with a book-length project, he sent me a long letter of encouragement. Be yourself on the page, he counseled, and be advised that making a living writing is extremely hard to do. "What does an artist do in the free enterprise system?" Vonnegut wrote. "He scrounges. Cheers, Kurt."

Finally, a dictionary for subversives: the Institute for Infinitely Small Things has come out with "The New American Dictionary: Interactive Security/Fear Edition.'' It includes new terms such as "axis of evil'' and "smart bomb'' and new definitions for old words such as "torture'' and "democracy.''

The book launch party is at 6:30-8:30 p.m. Thursday, April 26, at Art Interactive, 130 Bishop Allen Drive, Cambridge.

A little King Kong: Commercial Street elevated structure knocked over by the molasses flood

Boston's Beacon Press next month publishes Stephen Puleo's new book about the less-written and talked-about historic ethnic group in Boston, "The Boston Italians." At the same time, Beacon sent out copies of the paperback edition of Puleo's 2003 book about the strangest disaster in American history, "Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919." Twenty-one were killed and 150 injured when 2.5 million gallons roared out of a collapsing rooftop storage tank in the North End.

My late mother, who was born in 1911, remembered that event well. She and her family lived in the West End, probably a half-mile from the disaster. As an adult, she loved children's books, and worked for a number of years for the Horn Book, the Boston-based children's book review. One day, long after her retirement, she was looking through some new children's books that someone had given her, and came to one about the flood. As she so often did, she tucked a typed note inside the cover:

"This book treats the molasses flood as if it was funny. But it was not funny. It was a horror. I was afraid to go near that neighborhood for a long time, and the smell lasted for years."

The fascination with "wikis" -- Internet-based writing projects that anyone can edit, add to, or subtract from, has finally reached fiction. Collaborating with the U.K.'s De Montfort University, the British branch of Penguin Books is sponsoring a wiki-novel, entitled "A Million Penguins." Begun last month, the novel is now finished and can be read -- or at least inspected -- here. The project managers explain, in cheery British fashion, "We should go into this with the best spirit of scientific endeavour - the experiment is going live, the lab is under construction, the subjects are out there. And the results? We’ll see in a couple of months."

According to a piece by Alice Fordham in the Times of London, the project included 1,500 authors. Apparently, it resembles the experience of listening in to a cacophony of conversations going on at a ball park. Fordham writes, "At one point the story split into 'Novel A' and 'Novel B' and the site has links to alternative endings. Characters and storylines appear and disappear in a sometimes incomprehensible mass of writing." A sample from a chapter called "Brain Food":

"There was no possibility of taking a walk that day... a swim, perhaps, but not a walk - for Artie was a whale, a humpback whale, to be precise, at least in these moments. It was a sunny day, and Artie would have worn his sunglasses, but being a whale meant he didn't have ears, which made it difficult for his sunglasses to stay on. No matter, he thought, at least he was young and strong...."

In a chapter entitled, "The Walls Came Tumbling Down," we read this, on the edge of our seats: "Meanwhile, across town, Jim was staring despondently at the first draft of his novel. 'This isn't going well' he thought. There were far too many banana references, for a start. No one cares, or wants to read about bananas anyhow."

A look at "A Million Penguins" leads to at least one important conclusion: A thousand people can write a stinko book just as well as one, but so much much faster.

Farrar, Straus & Giroux has just come out with a paperback edition of the collected stories of Grace Paley, 13 years after the hardcover edition was published. Paley is a revered master of the short story as well as a poet and a political activist. Now in her 80s, Paley published her first short story in 1959 and resisted pressure to move on to writing a novel.

Next Wednesday, April 18, she will give a talk, sponsored by Boston University's Creative Writing Program, at 7:30 p.m. at BU's Photonics Center, 8 St. Mary Street. Catch her if you can.

You might as well get used to it: It's going to be virtually all Harry Potter all the time for the next three months, leading up to the July 21 release of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," the seventh and last installment in the adolescent epic. Trying to pump up the excitement early, Amazon.com is searching for "the Harry-est towns in America" -- that is, the 10 communities with the most pre-orders on a per capita basis. Amazon.com will keep tabs on the numbers and change the list accordingly, and the Harry-est town on pub day will get a $5,000 prize, given to a local charity. So far, says Amazon, which has had 450,000 orders, here are the top ten:

1. Falls Church, Va.
2. Fairfax, Va.
3. Gig Harbor, Wash.
4. Vienna, Va.
5. Katy, Texas
6. Media, Pa.
7. Issaquah, Wash.
8. Doylestown, Pa.
9. Pembroke Pines, Fla.
10. Snohomish, Wash.

Looking at this list, I'm wondering why, in a country of 50 states full of Potter fans, three states comprise eight of the 10 towns. In fact, the three Virginia towns are all close-in suburbs of Washington, D.C. and the three Washington state towns are all Seattle suburbs. Perhaps D.C. and Seattle are home to an unusually dense concentration of fantasy lovers.

Literary rankings listed in a recent issue of the San Francisco Bay Guardian smack of boosterism without a lot of documentation, but they're fun anyway:

Number of bars in San Francisco versus number of independent bookstores selling new books:
2,870:33

Rank of San Francisco among cities for most bookstores per 10,000 people:
1

Rank for most literate, in comparison with New York City:
10 vs. 49

What else would you expect of a Left Coast publication that asks "Is Updike obsolete?" and offers a resounding "YES.''

Myla Goldberg, whose debut novel "Bee Season'' was adapted for film in 2005, is coming out with her first children's book. "Catching the Moon,'' with illustrations by Chris Sheban, is being published next month by Scholastic. It tells a sweet tale about a fisherwoman who, believing the moon is made of cheese, tries to hook the Man in the Moon with a mouse.

Goldberg came up with the idea of writing a children's book when she was in college. The first draft was written in 1992, the final draft in 2006.

April is Poetry Month. Among the ways to celebrate:

= On Tuesday, April 10, at 7 p.m., the Newton Free Library hosts its 34th annual evening of poetry. Louisa Solano, the former owner of the Grolier Poetry Bookshop in Harvard Square, will read poetry by some of her favorite patrons. Also reading will be Martha Collins and Joan Houlihan, founding director of the Concord Poetry Center.

= On April 14-15, the Boston Public Library hosts the Boston National Poetry Month Festival. Maxine Kumin, a former poet laureate, is among the 50 poets who will read their work. Somerville poet Doug Holder sings the praises of this event on his Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene blog: "I can’t think of any event of its kind that attracts so many folks from the academic, non-academic, Slam, and traditional spoken word schools or venues." (See his blog for more on both of these events.)

= This is the second year I've signed up for Knopf's poem-a-day e-mail for the month of April. The daily poem can be a pleasant diversion from whatever it is you're supposed to be doing. (Send a blank email to sub_knopfpoetry@info.randomhouse.com.)

= And if you find yourself in New Haven this month, you should know that Atticus Bookstore at 1082 Chapel St. and
Chabaso Bakery will give a free loaf of bread to anyone who comes into the downtown bookstore on Fridays and recites a poem aloud. Participants will ring a bell, recite a poem, get a loaf of bread.

"Not a deed would he do,
Not a word would he utter,
Till he's weighed its relation
To plain bread and butter."

~ James Russell Lowell

Carol Iaciofano, a talented critic who writes a monthly book review for the Globe, has just launched her own blog. Not surprisingly, it has a strong literary component, including listings of favorite books related to topics she's discussing.

Take a peek.

"Novel Reflections on the American Dream,'' airing on WGBH tonight and other times, looks at what seven American novels have to say about the American dream. Of course, there's "The Great Gatsby'' and "The Grapes of Wrath,'' but there's also "The Street'' by Ann Petry and "Typical American'' by Gish Jen, two of my favorite novels. Petry's novel chronicles the struggles of a young black woman raising her son in Harlem. It is more current than you'd expect of a book published in 1946. Like "The Street,'' "Typical American'' a tale of Chinese immigrants, is a first novel. And it's very funny.

I love it when I come across a book on a subject that does not interest me and it wins me over. Such a book came in the mail today: "Alliss' 19th Hole: Trivial Delights from the World of Golf,'' out in paperback this month.

Golfers will already know that author Peter Alliss is a well-known golf commentator and the son of British golf legend Percy Alliss, but that was news to me.

Peter tells stories about temper tantrums, like the time Wilbur Artist "Lefty'' Stackhouse, a professional golfer in the '30s and '40s, smashed an entire set of clubs to pieces against a tree trunk.

He offers a scorecard on US presidents who played golf, picking John F. Kennedy as the best of the bunch. Yet Kennedy couldn't be trusted to drive a golf cart, turning one over on a bridge at Palm Beach Country Club and landing in the water.

Not to be missed is the section on Animal Intrusions, though PETA wouldn't approve. In the 1972 Singapore Open, a cobra was guarding Jimmy Stewart's ball so Stewart killed the cobra with his club, killed its mate, and continued with his round.

[no SUNDAY listings]

MONDAY: Sebastian Junger discusses “A Death in Belmont,” at 7 p.m., at Porter Square Books, 25 White St., Cambridge … Atul Gawande talks about “Better,” at 6 p.m., at the Brattle Theatre, 40 Brattle St., Cambridge ($5) … Cathryn Jakobson Ramin discusses “Carved in Sand,” at 7 p.m., at the Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard St., Brookline … Poets Moira Linehan (“If No Moon”) and Brad Clompus (“Trailing It Home”) read at 7 p.m., at Book Ends, 559 Main St., Winchester.

TUESDAY: Aaron Petrovich (“The Session”) and Juan De Racacoechea (“American Visa”) read at 7 p.m., at the Brookline Booksmith … John Mitchell reads from “The Rose Café,” at 7 p.m., at Porter Square Books … Jennifer Baumgardner discusses “Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics,” at 6:30 p.m., at the Harvard Book Store, 1256 Mass. Ave., Cambridge … Poets Ellen Dore Watson and Martha Rhodes read 7 p.m., at the Central Square Branch Library, 45 Pearl St., Cambridge … John Waters performs and signs “This Filthy World,” at 7 p.m., at the Tsai Performance Center, 685 Comm. Ave.; tickets available from Barnes & Noble, Boston University, Kenmore Square.

WEDNESDAY: Rishi Reddi reads from “Karma and Other Stories,” at 6:30 p.m., at the Harvard Book Store … Poets Moira Linehan and Mary Pinard read at 7 p.m., at Porter Square Books.

THURSDAY: The editors of N + 1 magazine speak at 7 p.m., at the Brookline Booksmith … Porter Square Books sponsors a talk by Rory Stewart (“The Prince of Marshes”) at 7 p.m., at St. James Episcopal Church, 1991 Mass. Ave., Cambridge … Seth Lloyd discusses “Programming the Universe,” at 6:30 p.m., at the Harvard Book Store … Kevin Weeks and Phyllis Karas discuss “Brutal,” at 7 p.m., at Barnes & Noble, Boston University … Poet Henri Cole reads at 7 p.m., in Lamont Library, Harvard University, Cambridge … Cal Ripkin signs “Get in the Game,” at 12:30 p.m., at Borders Downtown Crossing, 10-24 School St. … Nathaniel Philbrick (“Mayflower”) speaks at 7:30 p.m., at Hamilton Hall, 9 Chestnut St., Salem ($25); for more information, call 978-744-2540, visit www.salemathenaeum.net.

FRIDAY: Molly O’Neill (“American Food Writing”) and Laura Shapiro (“Julia Child”) speak at 7 p.m., at Porter Square Books … Susie Davidson discusses her Holocaust book, “I Refused to Die,” at 7 p.m., at Temple Shalom Emeth, 16 Lexington St., Burlington … Heather Cox Richardson discusses “West from Appomattox,” at 3 p.m., at the Harvard Book Store … Rishi Reddi reads from “Karma and Other Stories,” at 7 p.m., at Jabberwocky Bookshop, 50 Water St., Newburyport.

SATURDAY: Eunice Lipton discusses “A French Seduction,” at 4 p.m., at the Brookline Booksmith … The Annual Boston Poetry Month Festival, featuring major and emerging poets, takes place from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., at the Boston Public Library, Copley Square.

Events are subject to change.