Inside Jacket

“Last night’s rannygazoo”: Jeremy Noel-Tod on compiling a new dictionary of slang using all sorts of novels, like “Ulysses” and “Right Ho, Jeeves.”

Danny DeVito will star in an animated adaptation of Dr. Seuss’s “The Lorax.”

On the perils of book-buying while intoxicated.

“I’m a pointillist, just working my tiny little piece of the canvas”: for the fortieth anniversary of “Doonesbury,” Slate interviews Gary Trudeau and gives us a peek at his fourteen-thousand-six-hundred-strip archive.

Paper yes, electrons no: with the holidays approaching, Alex Beam takes a stand against e-greetings.

Arundhati Roy faces the threat of arrest after a remark about Kashmir.

Don’t want to be just another Snooki this Halloween? Try dressing up as one of these literary characters.

Après Moleskine, le déluge: how Twitter made handwriting cool.

Joseph Stein, the author of “Fiddler on the Roof,” has died at the age of ninety-eight.

“The use of similes and metaphors confesses the defeat of language: we must compare because we cannot say.” Alberto Manguel on literature’s simultaneous promise of revelation and warning of defeat.

The Israel Antiquities Authority will team up with Google to put the Dead Sea Scrolls online.

“If you’re a citizen, you do stuff for your block, for your neighbors”: Toni Morrison on living through tough times.

Amazon will allow Kindle users to lend books to each other.

Did Jane Austen rely on her editor to insert the “exquisitely placed semicolon”?

Alice Walker on her new poetry collection, “Hard Times Require Furious Dancing.”

Naif al-Mutawa’s Islamic superheroes join forces with Batman and Superman in six new issues from DC comics.

Watermelons: fruit or vegetable? Bits of “inessential knowledge” from longtime NPR librarian Kee Malesky.

Who doesn’t love an underdog? Three absorbing début novels by unheralded authors.

Commuter’s secret: the New York Public Library’s second-smallest branch is underground, next to the 6 train.

Is it wrong to use “countless” to describe things that can actually be counted?

The Village Voice names Téa Obreht “Best New York Writer Young Enough to Make You Want to Slit Your Wrists.”

Inside the bleak but florid world of carny literature, the two-fingered man is king.

“A Story Before Bed,” an app that allows users to upload videos of themselves reading stories for their children, will give away a hundred thousand free recordings to military service personnel overseas.

Can’t get no satisfaction: why rock memoirs consistently disappoint.

College students still cling to paper textbooks despite heft, cost, and the availability of digital alternatives.

Going nowhere: travel writing is dead, and “Eat, Pray, Love” was the nail in the coffin.

A new study of brain injuries hints at the biological basis of creativity.

How to type in your own handwriting.

Madame Bovary, c’est moi: in defense of Flaubert’s much-maligned heroine.

Forget the stock market. With enough expertise, diligence, and patience, book collecting can be a stable, long-term investment.

J. K. Rowling is the first winner of the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Prize, awarded in Andersen’s hometown of Odense, Denmark.

Books on wheels: the Harvard Book Store launches a bicycle delivery service.

At one time, university librarians chose academic journals based on content and quality; nowadays, online vendors make the decisions for them.

“Run, don’t walk” to the bookstore: Junot Díaz on Patrick Chamoiseau’s “Texaco” and other must-reads.

A new fourth-grade history textbook used in Virginia claims that thousands of African Americans fought for the South during the Civil War. Scholars say it isn’t so.

Sticky, greasy, gastronomic chaos: on the perils of editing a cookbook.

The last lonely newsweekly: why Time needs Newsweek.

Which came first: cuneiform or hieroglyphics? A University of Chicago exhibit compares the world’s earliest writing systems.

A century after Mark Twain’s death, his autobiography hits number one on the best-seller lists, over two weeks ahead of its release.

Running the Books: what a lapsed Orthodox Jew learned from pimps, gangsters, and con men while working as a prison librarian.

Reading Tintin in Petra, Jordan.

Non aux bibelots: Paris cracks down on Seine-side book-sellers’ trinket sales.

A friend reveals that Steig Larsson spent a year training Eritrean guerillas how to use a grenade launcher.

Judy Blume’s young adult novel “Tiger Eyes” will be made into a feature film, directed by the author’s son.

Greil Marcus and Sean Wilentz are talkin’ Bob Dylan.

“Eat Prey Love and Kill”: the sexy, gory fiction of Tamil pulp.

How to write a novel in only a month.

Beyond romance: Don Paterson tries to determine what Shakespeare’s sonnets really mean.