I am of Irish extraction. I like to drink. Somehow, though, I'm really not feeling St. Paddy's this year. Here then, is a perfect expression of my holiday glee:

God, those guys at Electric Literature and their little animations of single-sentence excerpts from the stories they publish. So good. (This one's from from "Little Things," by Matt Sumell.)

The University of Texas at Austin's Harry Ransom Center has, these past few years, aggressively been acquiring the papers of notable modern authors, as D.T. Max reported in a 2007 New Yorker piece; it included the revelation that director of the center counted David Foster Wallace among the second tier of living writers whose archives the center should target.

Two years later, Max was given access to the many papers left behind by David Foster Wallace as he worked on his wonderful postmortem profile. The contents of those papers—drafts, a little bit of correspondence, vocab lists, books read for pleasure and research and heavily marked-up with infinitely suggestive marginalia, vocab lists, and adorable juvenilia—have now been acquired by the Center; the New Yorker offers a sampling of their contents. They are, like the work itself, practically infinite, but out of them I have helpfully distilled their essence, found on the second page of an early letter sent to Wallace by Michael Pietsch, editor of Infinite Jest, and annotated by the author:

It may be hard to imagine how exciting this will be, just as it would have been difficult for a caveman to imagine an iPod or a microwave oven.

Greenman goes on to consider the ramifications for the very act of writing itself:

This will of course necessitate a slightly different approach, creatively, but we are determined to meet the challenge of this exciting technology. Writers will now be encouraged to fashion descriptions of scenes and subjects that maximize the third dimension.

Amazing stuff. What a world WORLD we live in.

Stein, also a critic of some accomplishment, should fit in at the tony black-tie Review: he's been active in New York's highbrow scene, as a cursory glance through his Observer introduction/appreciation published in early 2009, also noting his efforts to draw lay and insider readers into a community through FSG readings and other happenings (he even submitted a question to one of his own authors when she did a live chat at newyorker.com).

Coincidentally, or not, Farrar, Srauss and Giroux has publicized its upcoming catalog with an advertisement on the back cover of every issue of the Paris Review going back at least the last few years. In possibly related news, I have just "met" the barely legal leggings-and-thong-clad American Apparel model who will soon take over the L's film editor position.

Margaret Atwood: "Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can't sharpen it on the plane, because you can't take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils."

Roddy Doyle: "Do not place a photograph of your favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide."

Anne Enright: "The first 12 years are the worst," and "Only bad writers think that their work is really good." (The latter being profoundly, tragically true.)

Richard Ford: "Don't have children."

Neil Gaiman: "Laugh at your own jokes."

Of course, all this free and easy advice-giving moved us here at The L Mag to provide you with our own list of essential writing tips...

We've expressed dissatisfaction in the past with the increasingly prevalent practice of shooting trailers for upcoming books, but how can you argue with this B-movie-meets-History Channel promo for the latest "from the New York Times bestselling author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies," Seth Grahame-Smith's Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, which hits book shelves tomorrow? Especially with puns like Abe, in voice-over, complaining: "I've been a slave to vampires for thirty years." Slavery jokes from the great emancipator, yay! (TheDailyWhat)

This is the best thing to show up in my Facebook news feed in a very long time. Also, the girl was totally Mark Asch.

... and never read again. Book lovers never go to bed alone, people. Personal shelves, libraries, bookstores, offices; good stuff, reference stuff, kids' stuff, decorative stuff, crap; spines visible or invisible. More than 200 pages of archives.

The book is 117 small pages in large type; it takes place, thus far, at a MoMA gallery showing a slowed-down 24-hour loop of Psycho, and in the desert. Time is dilated, and the tone is musing and elemental. The piece points out that, following the midlife explosion of creativity that culminated in Underworld, DeLillo has retreated somewhat, into slender, more abstract and searching novels. Having tackled "Americana," sports and nuclear war and rock and roll and baseball and Kennedy and Oswald and Warhol and terrorism and Americana again in sprawling (and very funny) prose, DeLillo, now in his 70s, is stepping, quite tentatively, onto a more metaphysical plane.

The tentativeness—which comes through in the books' construction more than on a sentence-by-sentence level—makes sense. For instance, today's Times piece really only exists because its author is former New Yorker fiction editor and New York Times Book Review editor Charles "Chip" McGrath, who is presumably an acquaintance of long-enough standing to gain access to the mostly private DeLillo. (An appearance a week from tonight at BookCourt has been advertised as his only NYC reading in conjunction with the novel.) His privacy is, as his self-effacing answers to McGrath's questions indicate, of the modest kind—he'll lecture a bit, contribute essays or interviews here and there, as tabulated on the best website on the internet—and it may not surprise you to learn that the author-laureate of technological creep in American life doesn't have email: "[It] encourages communication I’d just as soon not have."

This collection is in the early stages of development and the first donations of papers will not be available for research use until the late fall of 2010, at the earliest.

And what's inside?

Fearing a generational "civil war" between young people and a "silver tsunami" of the aged in the coming decade, Amis, who's lost people close to him to awful degenerative diseases, told the Sunday Times, "There should be a [euthanasia] booth on every corner where you could get a martini and a medal." Fuck. I like martinis, and I love medals—I don't see the problem here. Various societies in favor of oldness are outraged.

Of course, the million dollar question here is which side Amis, now 60, would fight on in the coming war. He says himself: "Well, I'm not a million miles away from that myself."