Laila Lalami

The original scroll manuscript for On The Road will be touring the United States for the next three years. It won’t be on the left coast till 2006.

John Updike reviews Hanif Kureishi’s new novel, The Body, in which an older writer has his mind transplanted into the supple, younger body of a Los Angeles man of 25.

Perhaps no novel can do justice to the ancient and still popular concept of leaving our bodies, which are both our enablers and our prisons. Our relation to our bodies lies deeper than circumstance, undemonstrable and irrefutable, along with the sensation that there is a relation, of one thing to something else, though materialist science tells us that out of our bodies we are nothing.

The review was generally positive, though.

The Little Prince is going to be made into a movie by the same folks who made Chicken Run. Here’s hoping that Mel Gibson won’t be doing the

There is life after Book. In fact, this article has a list of book-related magazines. (Requires registration.)

Haypenny has gone belly up. You can read the editors’ ultimate sign-off here.

Small Spiral Notebook is launching a print edition this winter, and the first issue includes fiction by Tara Wray, Paul A. Toth, David Barringer, Brian Ames, and Felicia Sullivan, as well as interviews with Aimee Bender and Beth Ann Bauman. You can pre-order a copy here.

The Telegraph has an article on absinthe.

Its literary devotees believed absinthe freed the imagination. According to Wilde, the first stage in its consumption was “like ordinary drinking”, in the second “you begin to see monstrous and cruel things, but if you persevere you will enter in upon the third stage where you see things that you want to see, wonderful and curious things”. At one time or another, both the brilliance and the mental problems of many artists and writers, from van Gogh to Strindberg, have been attributed to absinthe.

Somewhere in there is a book review, too.

Photographs that had been stored by Ernest Hemingway at Sloppy Joe’s in Key West are said to be those that had been given him by Walker Evans when the two were in Cuba in the 1930s. You can see some of Walker Evans’ other photographs here.

So I scored 7 out of 10: Not bad (but no cigar, Pharaoh or otherwise). I would have taken the quiz a bit more seriously if they’d spelled Georges R&eacutemi correctly.

I’ve got a chapter to write, a new book to read, kitchen floors to clean, and it’s a slow news day. Be back soon.