This is your brain on books.

Jane Austen’s Emma comes to the big screen…in Bollywood. I am very excited to see Emma and Mr. Knightley dance and sing. For reals.

O helo thar: a good old fashioned book burnin’ at a Baptist Church in North Carolina. Books to be burned include such “heretical works” as Rick Warren, Mother Theresa, and, uh, the Bible. Book burning: ur doin it rong.

Maurice Sendak says he does “not tolerate” the opinion that Where the Wild Things Are is too scary for children, and concerned parents should “go to hell.”

The question is asked, again: is Twitter ruining literacy? We say, again: nope.

Boys like zombies because they’re both “dumb, brutal, ugly, and mindlessly violent.” Girls like vampires because they’re a proxy for the gay men they secretly want to date. Okay.

Publishers love short story collections! Hooray! Although I seem to recall a few weeks ago publishers saying that they hated short story collections, but maybe I’m remembering wrong.

NBC has begun a residency program. The first artist in residence is not Yo Yo Ma, or Hilary Mantel, but rather Jon Bon Jovi.

From The Onion: “Privileged Little Artiste Writing Something Oh-So-Precious Into His Moleskine Notebook.” And my love for The Onion abounds.

Study finds that children are distracted from reading by TV and video games, no one is surprised.

Another study finds that Roald Dahl is still da bomb.

And yet another study finds that more than half of primary school teachers in the UK are unable to name more than two poets.

The LA Times reconsiders Vonnegut’s lesser-known work, which they decide is also brilliant.

Aaand your pick-me-up: a comedic translation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road from The Millions. Excerpt:

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold and the ditch he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Not in a weird way. The nights dark beyond all reckoning of darkness, days endless gray. He rose from the reeking sleeprags and looked towards the east for a hint of light. Long ago snuffed by lowhanging dust, crusted and festering whoremouth. In the dream from which he’d wakened he and the child had wandered in a cave, scrounging for rotted batmeat. Shadows playing the walls like clownpuppets, the whitegloved fingers gnarled and ginshaken. Encircled by the dim, an abattoir lullaby. They came to a great stone room within which lay a longdead lake, its water stagnant and foul. And on the far shore a eunuch mime, naked save for a filthy gray cravat. Dead eyes milky and hollow. With a thin straw to its dirtscarred lips, it knelt, sipping from the brack. It heard their steps, craning its mimeneck to see what it could not. Skin translucent, ribs charbling and swortled, the heart beating tiredly. Facepaint smeared. It waved sadly in their direction, for it could not speak. Then it scuttled into the inky blackness. The man shook his head in the freezing predawn. No more peaches before bed.

With the first gray light he rose and walked out to the road and squatted and studied the country to the south. Godless and blasted. A madman’s timeshare. The trees dead, the grass dead, the shrubs dead also. The rivers dead. And the streams and reeds, the mosses and voles. Dead as well. He glassed the ruins, hoping for a shred of color, a wisp of smoke, a faroff Cracker Barrel. There was nothing but swirling gloom, a grasping murk. He sat with the binoculars and the gray, and thought: the child is my warrant. If he is not the word of God God never spoke, although he might have scribbled something on a paperscrap and passed it along. He bit hard on his blistered upperlip. If only I had thought to give him a name. If only.

Read the rest here.