Playboy will publish an excerpt of Vladimir Nabokov‘s final work, an unfinished novella titled The Original of Laura. Don’t look so shocked: The magazine interviewed him in 1964.
Ernest Hemingway: KGB spy?
The Second Pass takes a look at ten books that need to be tossed out of the canon. First up, Don DeLillo‘s White Noise: “DeLillo sacrifices any sense of realism for dull, thin polemic.” I’m not buying the “polemic” bit, and who said he was shooting for realism anyhow?
The Iowa Review has a new editor.
Politico rings up Ward Just for a quote about the death of Robert McNamara.
Eudora Welty‘s estate pulled her name out of the running for the renaming of her alma mater, the Mississippi University for Women.
The Atlantic has a modest proposal: Give tax breaks to publishers who support new and little-known writers. M.A. Orthofer retorts, “don’t ‘not-for-profit’ publishers (many of the finest small publishers in the US) already get obscene tax breaks ?”
John Updike‘s longtime home in Beverly Farms, Mass., sold last month for $2.5 million.
Jim Harrison has a pretty fancy house too, though his actual writing room looks like a cubicle in an abandoned real-estate brokerage.
George Pelecanos doesn’t know jack about writing about shotguns, according to a Field & Stream gunblogger: “Pelecanos in particular will put characters in a tense armed standoff, then have someone say ‘I can shoot you before you have time to rack that pump.’ In real life the immediate reply would be ‘Boom.'”
markathitakis.com 
Just’s new book is out now. Yardley at the WaPo thinks it’s one of his three best novels:
http://www.powells.com/blog/?p=7331
It’s definitely one of Just’s better efforts (I should have a review appearing soon). As far as his Washington-focused novels go, though, I still prefer “Echo House.”
Speak of the devil, my review of “Exiles in the Garden” just got posted online:
http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/books/50405422.html?page=1&c=y
Echo House is on my shelf, and I’ll probably read that before the new one. Which did you like better – An Unfinished Season, or Forgetfulness?
“An Unfinished Season,” partly because I gravitate toward Chicago novels, and I think that it’s among the few very good ones. It’s also the first novel of Just’s I read, and the one that sent me back to read as many of his other books as I’ve had time for.