Monday's Margins: An audio/visual book club, Evenson online, "Gilead" and the left, reference books, swine flu, and eARCs.

The Onion's AV Club has started an online book discussion group. Katherine Dunn's Geek Love is the first book up for chatting.

A new online lit magazine, Wag's Revue, has a Brian Evenson story for your enjoyment. Evenson (The Open Curtain) has two new books right now: the detective/noir/gothic/psychotic Last Days and the short story collection Fugue State. One of the stories in that collection features a literary agent whose supervisor has a particularly unpleasant way of pushing for books that will sell, as opposed to books with literary merit. There's also a Dave Eggers interview with more of the same about What.

Marilynne Robinson's Gilead "has potentially deep implications for the left."

In a world where reference is largely done online, there still remain essential reference books. Not everyone thinks The Elements of Style is one of them.

Author Daniel Hernandez is in Mexico City and is blogging about swine flu and updates related. This, at this moment, seems to be the best possible reason for the Internet. ...I don't know about you, but it makes me queasy to think about President Obama shaking an archaeologist's hand only to have said archaeologist die from the flu the next day.

The electronic Advanced Reader's Copy, or eARC, gets the shakedown and publishers, look and see, you can save bags of money. Send everyone a Kindle (I just became queasy again) and the publishing industry will emerge in the black. The problem is that unscrupulous pirates might take the eARC of a forthcoming book - say, David Mitchell's new book, coming next year - and distribute it via the internet to everyone, which would then sink the publishing industry. Or, maybe not, since ARC's aren't exactly nice to look at, or hold, or shelve, whereas finished copies of books are looking better all the time - and if someone's wanting a book that badly, that far in advance, aren't they likely to buy it anyway once it's properly released? Summary: send me the new David Mitchell right now, in any format; I promise I'll buy it. Pinky swear.

Monday's Margins: Random House's biggest first printing EVER, lost works, a famous poet's kitchen, and joyful geek humor!

Random House has announced their largest first print run in the history of the company for--you guessed it--Dan Brown's next book, set to be released on September 15th of this year. The new book is called "The Lost Symbol" and the narrative is set over the course of twelve hours.

In honor of Shakespeare's birthday on the 23rd of April, I present you with a fascinating article from the Wall Street Journal called "Longing for Great Lost Works". I never realized this tidbit of information: "Like most dramatists of the period, Shakespeare didn't care about his plays after their performances, made no effort to publish them and received no money from their publication." (Via Bookninja)

Ever wonder what Edna St. Vincent Millay's kitchen looked like? See a slideshow here. (Via The Book Bench)

Comic geeks will rejoice at this hysterical video that I came across thanks to @bookavore on Twitter:

Monday's Margins: Amazon Hates on the Gays; Towards a National Short Story Month; New Stories from Stephen Dixon, Chris Adrian, and Lydia Davis

People at Amazon.com must be wishing for a lot of things this morning, not least of which would be an established presence on Twitter, which was swamped over the weekend with discussion of Amazon de-listing the sales figures for books that in some way involve gay and lesbian issues. The online retail giant's search engine is structured in such a way that such a policy ensures that you're incredibly unlikely to find a book - even if searching for a specific title - if it involves what the policy refers to as "adult content." The book reading public is outraged over being told what they can and can't read; the gay and lesbian community are outraged over being discriminated against; and authors are outraged at being blacklisted when books like Ron Jeremy's autobiography are still easily found and purchased. For more on this, see Ed Champion's site, which includes telephone numbers for Amazon's board of directors (and while you're there, do me a solid and tell them that the Kindle sucks) and follow the discussion on Twitter at #amazonfail and #glitchmyass.

In a more positive development, some enterprising bookish folks are looking into how to make a National Short Story Month a reality. Join in the discussion at Readerville.

Finally, some good news: a new Stephen Dixon story, a new Chris Adrian story, and apparently this fall will see a Collected Stories of Lydia Davis being issued by FSG. Available soon for preorder, and if you'd like to get it somewhere other than Amazon, might I suggest looking into IndieBound and the always-reliable Powell's.

Gary Lutz's Stories in the Worst Way Reissued

Kevin Sampsell of Future Tense Press recently noted that Gary Lutz's Stories in the Worst Way is being reissued by Calamari Press.

Sampsell wrote, "This is my favorite book ever and a book that should never go out of print."

Former Identity Theory music editor Ross Simonini put it like this in his 2005 Believer interview with Lutz: "Lutz has published two short-story collections--Stories in the Worst Way and I Looked Alive--both of which should be read by anyone even mildly interested in the capacity of language."

Monday's Margins: Book Snobbery, Short Stories, Reading the Classics, and Author Interviews/Reviews

...Over at the Virginia Quarterly Review's blog, Mandy Redig talks about book snobbery. "Despite its world-wide popularity and the fact that Stephenie Meyer's debut novel has sold 17 million copies, I just can't help my tendency to, well, smirk."

...A.O. Scott talks about one of my favorite literary forms, the short-story, over at The New York Times in an essay called "In Praise of the American Short Story." I'm not sure how I feel about his claim that the Kindle will help with a resurgence of short-story readers.

...Lydia Kiesling has been blogging about Modern Library books over at The Millions. Her latest post talks about the Alexandria Quartet.

...The April issue of Bookslut has a wide variety of author interviews and reviews as usual, including some contributions from yours truly.

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bible! (in paperback)

April 7 marks yet another beginning of, well, everything. That is, if you're a believer in the Old Testament, Jonathan Goldstein style.

Goldstein, contributing editor to This American Life and author of Lenny Bruce Is Dead, has re-imagined neurotically, meticulously and laugh-out loud funny some of his favorite Old Testament heroes. Publishers Weekly says of Goldstein's ancient Israeli characters that David kills Goliath not so much for his people as for laughs, and Jonah's lesser-known brother Vito fears that God's hand in Jonah's stint inside the whale has less to do with Jonah than Vito's own role in a youthful penis-touching incident.

So far my personal favorite in the collection (some of which you can listen to online) is Adam and Eve in the Garden, not because Goldstein nails Adam and Eve in all their contemporary humor and yearning, not to mention Adam's boredom and Eve's postmodern ken of sexual power, but because of The Snake--one wicked-funny adorably winning evil thing that channels, magically, the souls of Iago, Bugs Bunny, and we imagine Goldstein himself.

-Post contributed by Stacy Muszynski
Purchase Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bible at Powells.