John Scalzi has won the Hugo award—the sci-fi genre’s highest prize—for Redshirts, “a comedic novel about a group of ensigns aboard a spaceship who discover they are actually part of a television show similar to ‘Star Trek.’”
Actors Dakota Johnson and Charlie Hunnam (who you might remember as Lloyd on “Undeclared”) have been cast as Anastasia and Christian in the film adaptation of the first volume of the Fifty Shades of Gray series.
In the latest issue of the New York Times Magazine, Wyatt Mason profiles Norman Rush, and recounts the author’s broken promise to his wife—“that his next novel would be a mere 180 pages and take two years to complete.” Subtle Bodies, which is coming out in November, might approximate that page count, but it came eight years after deadline. Mason visited the couple at their home in Rockland County, New York, and spoke with Rush about gender and writing, among other things.
Page Views surveys the best literature about Hurricane Katrina, eight years after the storm
Kottke rounds up the best things to read about Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who died last week at the age of 74.
Stephen Enniss has replaced Thomas F. Staley as the director of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin. In addition to collections like the McSweeney’s archive and the papers of Denis Johnson and David Foster Wallace, “the center now contains about 42 million manuscripts, 5 million prints and negatives, and 100,000 works of art and design in its collection, including a Gutenberg Bible, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s Watergate papers, important documents from a who’s who of late greats like Evelyn Waugh, Tennessee Williams and Graham Greene, and the archives of writers still hard at work, including Julian Barnes, Tom Stoppard and David Mamet.” It was founded in 1957 by Harry Ransom.