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?

National Book Award Finalists announced: view the full list here.

Bartleby had Asperger’s; Tiny Tim suffered from distal renal tubular acidosis: on undiagnosed maladies in literature.

Hope or satisfaction? In honor of Snow White’s two hundredth birthday, a look at the different types of fairy-tale endings.

Watch a novel being written live by thirty-six authors.

Bloomsbury will reprint fifty-thousand copies of Howard Jacobson’s “The Finkler Question,” the winner of the Man Booker Prize.

Sample six of the one hundred digested twentieth-century classics from John Crace’s Brideshead Abbreviated.

The Washington Post reviews three books about UFOs.

Why Thomas Jefferson would want us to build a National Digital Library.

“White people had all the power and blacks had none”: read an excerpt from Condoleezza Rice’s memoir about growing up in segregated Birmingham.

Thursday would have been Truman Capote’s eighty-sixth birthday. Need proof? His birth certificate is for sale at AbeBooks.

Literary authors feel the pinch: the new economics of the e-book.

Writers Yiyun Li and Annette Gordon-Reed and type designer Matthew Carter are among the twenty-three recipients of this year’s MacArthur “Genius” Grants.

Amazon launches Kindle for the Web, an e-book preview service.

“He is a murderer, and he is a sociopath…he is also provocative and intelligent”: the Unibomber publishes a book through a Port Townsend, Washington, publisher.

Must-tweet TV: guess which Twitter feed is getting its own TV show!

Explore Greensboro, North Carolina, a “hamlet crawling with writers.”

Anthony Bourdain is working on a food-themed graphic novel that he describes as an “ultra-violent slaughter-fest.”

Like life itself: Akeel Bilgrami on literature and the pleasures of miscellany.

National Geographic will issue its first Arabic edition next month.

Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons argue that “The Secret” and “The Power” represent a kind of “intellectual virus.”

“The Wizard of Oz” is notoriously difficult to adapt for the theatre, but that won’t stop Andrew Lloyd Webber from trying.

The Kindle’s first paid app: a version of Scrabble from Electronic Arts.

A look back at the most scandalous fiction published in Playboy.

“One of the first to show that you don’t have to write down about sports or empurple them, either”: Charles McGrath on Updike’s 1960 essay “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu.”

“Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?” and other banned books you might not expect.

Not a matter of taste: scientists on the most accurate science-fiction books.

Toward a new vocabulary for the evolving world of publishing.