George Romero, novelist. But there's something I'm not sure about:

Publisher Vicki Mellor said that zombies were "one of the new buzz words in publishing". "I think that the world is ready to re-embrace the zombie culture - after the massive amount of vampire novels that have been published, it's time for a change of antagonist," she said. "We are very aware that there is going to be an explosion of zombie novels being published over the next year, but we absolutely believe that we have the definitive novel from the one author whom every fan of the genre will want to read."

There's been a big-budget zombie movie every year since 28 Days Later in 2002, and that's not even getting started on video games, comics, and some already successful novel franchises. The zombie bubble is clearly about to burst; I'm urging strong sell on zombies and buy on the Wolfman.

Ralph Nader, novelist.

Neuoscientist as novelist, at MSNBC, via 3QD.

"In some sense, I use my literary fiction as a channel to explore ideas that I come up with during the day," he told me.

For example, consider how the data in your brain determines your identity. "For a long time, there's been this open question of what it would be like to be someone else - or to be something else," he said. "Once you're John Malkovich, you wouldn't remember what it's like not to be John Malkovich."

That spawned Eagleman's little story about cross-species reincarnation, titled "Descent of Species": Suppose you admired the strength and beauty of horses, and you got the chance to become a horse in your next life. Once you become a horse, would you have enough wits to appreciate that life, or even enough wits to choose the life after that? And if that's the case, what unwitting demigods might we humans have been in our past lives?

Other stories play off the fact that existential meaning doesn't scale well. "What would happen if we showed Shakespeare to a dog or a bacterium?" Eagleman asked. "It's pointless, because what's meaningful to you changes by spatial scale."

For example, a microbial God might reserve the afterlife strictly for microbes, with humans merely serving as part of the scenery. Or the universe might be ruled by a cosmic Giantess who is as indifferent to our fate as we are to the fate of an amoeba.

One thousand novels everyone must read. Via Bookninja.

Why one thousand?
Why novels?
Why everyone?
Why "must"?
Why (yes) read?

Thursday links while I should be doing other things. Also, for the tiny handful of Final Crisis fans out there&mash;spoiler alert.

* DC is pretending they've killed off Batman. It's adorable.

* Was Che Guevara "a type of Batman"? So claims Benico del Toro.

* Superuseless superpowers. Via Kottke. "13th Bullet Bulletproof" made me laugh.

* In my email: the Wikipedia page for the hilarious sounding but actually fairly tragic Boston Molasses Disaster.

Molasses, waist deep, covered the street and swirled and bubbled about the wreckage. Here and there struggled a form — whether it was animal or human being was impossible to tell. Only an upheaval, a thrashing about in the sticky mass, showed where any life was... Horses died like so many flies on sticky fly-paper. The more they struggled, the deeper in the mess they were ensnared. Human beings — men and women — suffered likewise.

* Earth from space. Just another awesome post from the Big Picture.

* Obama's people: portraits of 52 top members of the Obama team.

* Did the Victorian novel make us better people? Will computer screens kill literacy? What's going to happen all the white people? And is there life on Mars?

I was 45 years old and tired of being an artist. Besides, I owed $20,000 to relatives, finance companies, banks, and assorted bookmakers and shylocks. It was time to grow up and sell out, as Lenny Bruce once advised.

Mario Puzo on the secret origins of The Godfather. Via MeFi.

I called my brother to tell him the good news. This brother had ten per cent of The Godfather because he’d supported me all my life and gave me a final chunk of money to complete the book. So now I wanted him to know that since my half of the paperback rights came to $205,000, he was in for a little over 20 grand.

He is the kind of guy who is always home when I call to borrow money. Now that I had money to give back, he was naturally out. I got my mother on the phone. She speaks broken English but understands the language perfectly. I explained it to her.

She asked, ‘$40,000?’

I said no, it was $410,000. I told her three times before she finally answered, ‘Don’t tell nobody.’

Vindication for my poor life choices! Fiction - including poetry - should be taken just as seriously as facts-based research, according to the team from Manchester University and the London School of Economics (LSE). Here's the paper, via MeFi.

Ask Haruki Murakami anything. Via Bookslut.

I have a review in this week's Independent of Lewis Shiner's recent novel Black & White, set in Durham and centered around the destruction of the historic Hayti neighborhood in order to construct the Durham Freeway in 1970.

"The past," William Faulkner wrote, "is never dead. It's not even past." Lewis Shiner's new Southern noir Black & White—set in the author's hometown of Durham—is only the latest novel to rearticulate this central, inescapable American truth, the endless return of the secret histories and collective sins we wish could just stay buried.

There are secrets upon secrets in Black & White, sins upon sins, but they all revolve around a single, penetrating absence: Hayti, the African-American community gutted by the construction of the Durham Freeway 40 years ago. When comic artist Michael Cooper returns to Durham in 2004 with his elderly mother and father after a childhood spent in Dallas, Texas (his father has "come home to die"), he finds himself drawn deeper into this still-bleeding communal wound. A simple effort to retrieve a copy of his birth certificate—of which there is mysteriously no record—leads Michael unexpectedly to his father's involvement in the murder of a civil rights activist found in a concrete overpass on N.C. 147.

The corpse, of course, is more than just a single person's: This is Hayti's corpse, the murder still unsolved.

Shiner's story takes us deep into the unhealed psychic wounds surrounding the urban renewal movement of the 1960s and '70s, in which federal funds were taken by Southern cities such as Durham to "revitalize" troubled—read "black"—areas in what one of Shiner's characters describes as a "calculated revenge for integration. Urban renewal focused almost exclusively on black neighborhoods. Nothing was ever rebuilt, only destroyed." So it was with Hayti when it was cut in two to build the road leading out of town to Research Triangle Park.

I recently saw on Boing Boing that Shiner has put the whole novel online free of charge, a development I wholeheartedly approve of. For more on Hayti and its desecration, there's no better place to start than Endangered Durham.

Writing advice from Zadie Smith. Via Kottke.

When you finish your novel, if money is not a desperate priority, if you do not need to sell it at once or be published that very second - put it in a drawer. For as long as you can manage. A year of more is ideal - but even three months will do. Step away from the vehicle. The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer. I can't tell you how many times I've sat backstage with a line of novelists at some festival, all of us with red pens in hand, frantically editing our published novels into fit form so that we might go on stage and read from them. It's an unfortunate thing, but it turns out that the perfect state of mind to edit your novel is two years after it's published, ten minutes before you go on stage at a literary festival. At that moment every redundant phrase, each show-off, pointless metaphor, all of the pieces of dead wood, stupidity, vanity, and tedium are distressingly obvious to you.

Today is the [Undisclosed Location]quinox, which means we're halfway through the term. I could do this all summer. I'm not completely exhausted at all.

Clearing the decks this morning:

* What do the Dutch know that we don't? Thousands of people in the Netherlands are preparing for the 2012 apocalypse.

* A judge has ruled that, legally speaking, Duke football completely sucks.

* Nothing makes me feel more curmudgeonly than agreeing with Christopher Hitchens about anything, but my god—you'd think Tim Russert had been president before he became the pope. And that's before this stuff about miracles started.

* On the virtues of taking it slow as a novelist. Finally, my laziness patience has been vindicated!

* And good news from the world of science: the Large Hadron Collider probably won't destroy the earth.

The Novelists Guild of America strike, now entering its fourth month, has had no impact on the nation at all, sources reported Tuesday.

Orhan Pamuk on the social and political power of the novel. Via Bookninja.

Near the end of his talk, the novelist spoke of "a vision that I entertain from time to time." Sometimes, he said, he tries to "conjure up one by one a multitude of readers hidden away in corners, nestled in their armchairs with their novels."

Then, before his eyes, "thousands, tens of thousands of readers will take shape, stretching far and wide, across the streets of the city, and as they read, they dream the author's dream, imagine his heroes into being and see his world. So now these readers, like the author himself, try to imagine 'the other' -- they are putting themselves in another's place."

By the end of this vision, Pamuk said, he sees his novel readers as "an entire nation . . . imagining itself into being."

"Why so sad, people?" Julian Gough takes on the morbid and moribund contemporary novel. Via Austin Kleon.

No, the novel has not, in general, been able to seize its freedom—it has not gone comic. This has consequences. An unnecessary tragic bias, in something so powerful, will cause a great deal of avoidable suffering. Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, with its revoltingly sentimental suicide note, depressed a generation and caused a wave of fashionable suicides across Europe. (They even dressed in the same blue frock coat and yellow waistcoat.) Autobiographical novels are particularly revealing of the bias in the culture: in real life Goethe felt no need to kill himself after his heart was broken, but when he wrote a book about it, it had to be a tragedy and the hero had to die. A comedy would have been far more suitable. It might even have led to a cheerful late 18th-century Europe. But no, he gave us the furrow-browed Romantics.