You'll be happy to know that some people - or actually a lot of people - are still reading things other than Pop Eater. In fact they're reading books, lots of them, not to mention articles about people reading books, and books about articles about how we'll be reading books in the future.

Here at the Phoenix we're proud to be a big booster of the Boston Book Festival

The Boston Book Festival organizers announced today that they've chosen Richard Russo's story, "The Whore's Child," for Boston's second-annual "One City, One Story" program.

Russo won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel, Empire Falls. He has written a number of other hilarious, touching novels, as well as one collection of short stores, The Whore's Child, from whence the titular story comes.

Press releases are rarely exhilirating. A notable exception: one I received this morning for Marty Beckerman's The Heming Way. My excitement had next to nothing to do with the book itself (though the tongue-in-cheek paean to Hemingway as a drunk, womanizing ubermensch could be amusing). No, it was the press release that did it: I read it all the way through.

Yesterday, the Chicago Tribune reported that the Ernest Hemingway Museum in Hemingway's home town of Oak Park, Il, has no plans to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Papa's suicide, which will take place this July 2nd.

In years past, the museum has celebrated milestones such as Papa's 92nd birthday with a running of the bulls and his 100th with a Cuban-themed Fiesta del Hemingway

Gang of marauding E.B. White fans descend on the Phoenix offices.

What's more horrifying: empty shelves or rotting books?

Johnny Martorano. Whitey Bulger. The Boston Strangler. The Craigslist Killer. What do they have in common? All are the subjects of true-crime books from Boston-area writers: Howie Carr, Casey Sherman, and Michele McPhee. Together, they’ll freak out those assembled at the Somerville Theatre when they appear this Saturday as part of a night of true crime tales.

For many, poetry slams are like open mike nights or not-drunk-enough Karaoke: powder-kegs for some serious collective embarrassment. It can be stifling, that shared awkwardness between strangers. You never quite get used to it, the unease; what is that? Delusion? Social subtext? A moment of unforgiving clarity? It's sort of like a mumblecore sex-scene: you know awkward when you see it.

I had a little too much fun dumping some famous short stories into Wordle. For those unfamiliar with the site, it's a stylish word-cloud generator. The sizes of the words in the cloud indicate the frequency with which they're used in the given text.

The above is a Wordle of Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber

London-based Hamilton Richardson is the most undeservedly overlooked voice in the field of literary criticism. Though his work is spare -- only seven reviews to date -- his reach limited to customer reviews on Amazon UK, and his scope narrowed to the Mr. Men series by Roger Hargreaves, few critics working today could hope to match the precision of his prose, the scope of his knowledge, or the acuity of his understanding.

Maya Sloan graduated from BU's fiction program in 2007. In June, she published her first young adult novel, High Before Homeroom. She also published her senior prom picture on her homepage, along with a very good essay about why being a teenager is horrible. You can see it here.

Sigrid Nunez, a novelist who recently released her sixth book, Salvation City, will start teaching at BU next fall.