The Los Angeles Times’ book blog, Jacket Copy, lists 61 essential postmodern reads. Lists are designed to be argued over, so there’s no real point in interrogating all the selections. One thing, though: Reading Percival Everett‘s I Am Not Sidney Poitier a few weeks back, I didn’t think for a moment about whether it was “postmodern” or not. At the risk of invoking some ungainly term like “post-postmodern,” it may be that the postmodern novel is just something that happened, not something that’s happening—a method of wrestling with an increasingly mediated existence in the years before mediated existences became commonplace, before a ten-year-old kid could embed video and songs on a MySpace page and make virtual friends with some stranger in Bali. A lot of the stuff on the list, like I Am Not Sidney Poitier, seems more like metafiction than postmodernism, which aren’t synonymous terms. At any rate, I’m sure one of those ten-year-olds will grow up to write a novel that sorts it all out for us.
Scott McLemee considers the new biography of Saul Bellow‘s ill-fated colleague, Isaac Rosenfeld.
A book on Flannery O’Connor‘s Catholicism is in the works.
And a film based on Jhumpa Lahiri‘s Unaccustomed Earth might be.
Also in the works: A documentary about bad writing. The trailer features George Saunders delivering one of the smartest and most succinct explanations of what bad writing is that I’ve heard.
The Ransom Center has an online exhibit of artifacts from Norman Mailer‘s coverage of Apollo 11.
And Ted Gioia considers whether the moon landing was science fiction writers’ finest hour, and one from which it never quite recovered.
There’s too much damn fiction from Montana writers coming out. (Though I did enjoy Kevin Canty‘s new collection, Where the Money Went.)
Lionel Shriver: “I probably had more reading stamina and much loftier literary tastes at the age of 16 than I do now.”
“I am a man in my mid-50’s and starting to feel the weight of the years. I am wondering if there are some good books for me to read that address my station in life. I have never read any Updike or Roth, but I have the impression these authors address the concerns of the aging male. Do you have recommendations?”
The Elegant Variation has just wrapped up a four-part interview with Joseph O’Neill.
Museums dedicated to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway are celebrating anniversaries.
H.L. Mencken once inscribed a book for Carl Van Vechten with a list of the kinds of alcohol he drank during the three years he was writing it. It’s a long list.
markathitakis.com 
Mark: Re: postmodernism. I’d make the same distinction about genre fiction as well. Richard Price and George Pelecanos may write “mysteries,” but there’s a good deal of landscape and characterization that would lead you to believe that the so-called “mystery” label doesn’t matter at all. Postmodernism, at least as it is used in the above post, is often such a catch-all term that it makes one wonder why any serious reader would bother clinging to it. The book is the thing, and if one gains some emotional truth from the plunge, it shouldn’t matter what type of book it is.
I do hope you get around to Richard Powers’s GENEROSITY. I’m very curious what your thoughts are about it, particularly in light of the distinctions you make in this post.