Teehee,now that I can call him Red, I can’t resist. But you should read Robert ‘Red’ Birnbaum’s latest interview with poet Nick Flynn. His memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City came out to high praise last September. Another book for the TBR pile. Flynn comes across as a genuinely nice and straightforward guy.

Veteran interviewer Robert Birnbaum speaks with film critic David Thomson over at the Morning News.

“And as you know movie people are not overly critical of their own passion. It’s a hot bath they want to jump into and stay there. This is a book that in many ways raises questions and worries. About the overall achievement and culture of film. It asks the question, ‘Is it really an art? Are we doing it justice when we treat it as an art? Or isn’t it something more complicated and a bit less than art?'”

The Tournament of Books is almost over. The Championship round will be Roth’s The Plot Against America vs. Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. Tough call.

Because he insists on making the rest of us look lazy, Dan Wickett serves up another fascinating interview with editors of literary journals. Included are Ploughshares and the Kenyon Review. Check it out.

Our Pal the Rake has a great rundown on the Michael Chabon event he went to sponsored by Tattered Cover. We also learn that the Rake has a slight fear of old ladies in furs.

USA Today has a nice article on the rise of litbloggers. Bloggers mentioned are Laila Lalami of Moorish Girl, whose forthcoming book The Things Death Will Buy gets mentioned as well. Also the Complete Review and Maud Newton get some paragraphs.

Remember the Tournament of Books I mentioned a month or so ago? Well, it’s been going on all week. In fact, they start Round Two tomorrow I think. Well, it seems like the NYT heard about it and wrote an article. But they seem not to have read the TOB page too carefully (it’s not hard, I can’t see how they made this mistake). The author of the article says that The Rope Eater by Ben Jones beat Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange. Nope. Other way around people. I guess they still aren’t fact checking over there.