Which brings us to this grumpy-ass piece at Guernica by Honduran-in-exile writer Horacio Castellanos Moya. Moya's upset that North Americans occasionally drop lit-star Roberto Bolaño's name, and thinks, grumpily, that:

...the construction of the Bolaño myth was not only a publisher’s marketing operation but also a redefinition of the image of Latin American culture and literature that the North American cultural establishment is now selling to the public.

I am wary of any argument that cites a "North American cultural establishment" acting with the sort of predatory agency that's implied here. But let's, for a moment, concede that the NACE [pronounced Nah-tsee] supreme council came up with a unified plan to profit from a densely challenging 670-page work of metafiction-in-translation by a charismatic/dead Mexican-Chilean. Yes, let's.

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The current issue of Harper's reprints, in the Readings section, "Adult Situations", by Brett Fletcher Lauer, a poet and friend of the L. It's a found literary object, of sorts: a poem comprised of movie synopses drawn, occasionally slightly paraphrased, from online viewer guides such the imdb TV listings, and places like this. (Sample: "Rival reporters mix romance with work as they hunt an apartment-house killer.") It's a terrific compendium of inadvertent artistry and endlessly suggestive description. (It's also rather reminiscent of John Ashbery's "They Knew What They Wanted", in which every line is a movie title.)

The poem was originally printed in the lit mag jubilat, and in fact is online there now. Go, read it, and then come back.

Now, if you are like me, you probably took a minute to appreciate the piece, but mostly tried to figure out which movie each line describes. Some of them are comically straightforward descriptions of classics; there's some straight-to-cable dreck, soon-to-be-forgotten recent releases, and neglected late-show classics. So, as a public service, we have provided an answer key for you, after the jump. (In the interests of full disclosure, I correctly guessed 10 of the movies. You?)

There is a launch, tomorrow, with a kid-lit reading in the morning, and a reading and free champagne toast in the evening. And then, presumably, they'll keep funneling more and more alcohol down your gullet until you can't help but buy everything you see, and the evening descends into a free-for-all, well-dressed young parents clawing at each other for the last copies of The Elegance of the Hedgehog, chaos reigns.

Mead discusses the evolution of Sweet Valley High into Gossip Girl—"'We thought consumer were more sophisticated... They wanted their book to feel like Mom's book... with a cover that looked like it didn't have to come from the kids' section... and it wasn't embarrassing to be seen with,'" says Alloy's President—but one thing Mead doesn't go into is the ever-increasing adult readership for Y.A. literature. But looking at the Gossip Girl TV show's target audience, the subway ubiquity of Twilight and Harry Potter, et cetera, had me thinking again about Where the Wild Things Are—"There is no difference between childhood and adulthood" being an operating principle for this film that cozies up to the sensibilities and sensitivities of twentysomethings making less than a wholehearted commitment to adulthood.

My Mom doesn't use a computer, so every now and then I have to print out online stuff I've written and put it together in a little package. Does this mean that printed matter will always be around? I don't know, but the artists at the New York Art Book Fair certainly have an opinon.

Filmed and edited by Emmanuel Cruz.

Still, even in the European literary community, this appears to be the most surprising Nobel since, well, at least Elfride Jelinek. (Maybe even Wislawa Szymborska!) In her own own official statement Ms. Müller's confesses, "I am very surprised and still cannot believe it... I can't say anything more at the moment." (Not exactly Doris Lessing's "Oh Christ! I couldn't care less," is it?)

So, who is Herta Müller?

We're just going to keep pimping these great fucking videos commissioned by hot-to-trot lit web journal Electric Literature. This latest one is based on a single sentence from Diana Wagman's new book, Three-Legged Dog.

We don't like Tao Lin, at all. So I'll admit to a little schadenfreude at this video of two people showing up to a reading of his in Petaluma, California. Lin attempts to interview one, but even that, which sounds like a great idea for saving a night, is as flat as everything else he produces.

Tao Lin at Copperfield's Books from Melville House on Vimeo.

This year's favorite, currently running 4/1, is Amoz Oz, who I took in the pool last year. This makes sense, given that the geographical distribution of the prize the last few years seems to be pointing to the Middle East, and given Oz's mutually agreeable liberal Israeli politics. (Strangely, though, given the Swedish Academy's tendency to occasionally pass over someone whose "turn" it is, there are no odds given for David Grossman.) It will probably be either Oz, or a Scandinavian poet (been long enough—Thomas Transtromer, then?), or Philip Roth, finally, and we will all forget those mean, true things the Nobel people said about American literature last year.

Ladbrokes must clean up on this betting every year (except the year that Orhan Pamuk won), given how many people insist upon betting on Bob Dylan (currently 25/1, same as my two favorite living writers) every year because he's the only person on the list they've heard of. If he did win (he won't), Dylan would in fact become the second Nobel laureate in Literature to ever release a Christmas album (yes, yes he would too be, you're forgetting A Very Kenzaburo Oe Christmas).