At home with Claire Messud and James Wood, and their dachshund Myshkin, who for some reason didn’t make into the lead photo for this intimate profile of the “First Couple of American Fiction.”

Kim Gordon prefers to listen to rap music when she’s feeling traumatized, as she (and possibly all of Generation X) did when her marriage to Thurston Moore broke down. Also, she’s still totally rad. Even eternal rebel girl Kathleen Hanna thinks Gordon is the queen of the neighbourhood: “Fucking Kim Gordon thought I was on the right track, haters be damned. It made the bullshit easier to take, knowing she was in my corner.” Speaking of Bikini Kill, I wonder if anyone’ll be keeping track of all the explicitly feminist ponytails being worn by the audiences for The Punk Singerat Toronto’s Hot Docs festival. (Documentaries, by the way, are very much a thing right now.)

The young people are making new words slash old words do new things, and it’s cool. Language, man!

In the wake of the Orange Prize becoming the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and the subsequent release of the list of this year’s nominees, there have been a few tweets and columns asking why we even need a women-only literary prize. I’m of a few minds on this—do women-only prizes really address a potentially gender-segregated readership, do they pave a path for female authors to be taken more seriously by reviewers, do they encourage a wider awareness of women’s work? Or do sex-specific prizes simply console us a little, we may not get treated with the respect we deserve from, say, the Times or our publisher, but hey, maybe we’ll win this prize. I’m not sure what the answer is, but I do know that the prize has historically been awarded to some great books. This incredible and transparent piece from Deborah Copaken Kogan in the Nation doesn’t convince me of anything so much as the need for serious change in publishing—from the agent through to editor, book designer, publicist, reviewer and prize jury.

Here are two pieces on jokes, because they're on my mind: Alicia Louise Merchant's take on comedy and cancer, and a supremely touching account of a man who left some punchlines behind.

Dennis Johnson, the publisher who brought Hans Fallada back into print, answered a few questions from readers over at the Guardian. He said that he felt the pain of writing Every Man Dies Alone contributed to Fallada's death.

It’s sad to note the death of a man who taught a generation the critical value of their thumbs and reviewed over 200 films a year for nearly half a centurty. Roger Ebert, you were right; you’re not going anywhere. Some memories: that time Ebert won the New Yorker caption contest, that time Ebert was profiled beautifully by Chris Jones for Esquire, that time Ebert co-wrote an incredibly campy screen play, that time, that time Ebert looked frankly and clearly at mortality (and wrote wonderfully, lucidly about it), and that time he gave life itself two thumbs up. (Even if that last one’s from the Onion, they got it right and true. )

Renata Adler, interviewed by The Believer, on contemporary literary criticism: “More like a race to join the herd of received ideas and agreement.” And Sheila Heti, interviewed in Numero Cinq, on contemporary literary criticism: “It’s fun to see that stuff going on in America. In Canada, nobody was talking about the book in that way, so it’s cool to see it being used as a prop in peoples’ arguments.” Okay, and Michael Lista, in epistolary conversation in Poetry, on contemporary (especially Canadian) literary criticism: “Conservatism is the worst thing with which a critic can be charged; it implies that you’re inured to the only faculty that makes you worth reading—the ability to be surprised by the authentically new and have your mind changed by it.”

What? John Jeremiah Sullivan's got a new essay in Lapham's Quarterly about kitties? I mean, puppies? I mean, about how the hivemind is made of animals, but whether or not they in their hives and broods and packs have minds of their own? … While the final answer to the tricky question of animal minds may not be in that piece, it's a good read nonetheless. Clarice Lispector, in A Breath of Life, had this to say: “The dog is a mysterious animal because he almost thinks, not to mention that he feels everything except the notion of the future.” Then again, perhaps dogs are another thing all together—think about Virginia Woolf's novel from the perspective of a dog, Flush. If dogs don't have minds, how could the woman who managed to explore cognition so artfully have written that book? Or, one of my favourites, J.R. Ackerley's My Dog Tulip—while that particular pup is not so nearly-thoughtful as Lispector's fictional pet Ulysses, it speaks to something that we can feel so connected to animals, whose consciousnesses are by design very different from our own.

From Margaret Atwood's high school yearbook: “Peggy's not-so-secret ambition is to write THE Canadian novel.” Isn't that sweet? This via Flavorwire's little round-up of photos of famous authors as teens, which also features a sullen-looking 15-year-old Martin Amis with his more genially countenanced father.

Also, Michelle Dean on the Mary MacLane story—and the devil.

The New York Review of Books blog is dealing in the night these days, with its series on dreams. Can you resist the sleepy logic of some of the world’s most talented writers and thinkers contending with the scenes that come unbidden to their minds at rest? Or is the point that for the mind, to dream is the opposite of rest? Pico Iyer kicks it off: “Perhaps we impute too much to dreams precisely because we cannot control them; we infer that they come to us from some larger or at least external place that knows things that we don’t.”

It's a big, big week for re-releases. Renata Adler's Speedboat and Pitchdark are finally, finally in print again, thanks to the peerless publishers at NYRB Classics. Of course, you probably already know, given that Adler was on the cover of Bookforum, occasioned wonderful, readerly essays for the New Yorker's Page-Turner blog and the Paris Review Daily, and that her novels have been glowingly, thrillingly given notice and unabashedly loving reviews in the Guardian, the Tribune, and the Times. Normally, I would be incredibly resistant to the charms of a pair of works so widely and loudly championed, but here I'm at a loss; Adler's fiction—and, actually, her writing in general—demands reading and rereading. And if that won't convince you, allow me to quote Choire Sicha and so close the matter: “She literally is like, evil. In a way that people just don’t do anymore.”

Lord Bryon: monstrous as a man, sure. But was he or was he not a vampire? An important question, not precisely answered in this piece from Carrie Frye over at The Awl.

Sam Anderson, one of my favourite professional noticers, profiled Anne Carson in the New York Times Magazine this weekend. Here at home, National Post poetry critic Michael Lista had not much nice to say about her highly anticipated latest, Red Doc>, though they both agree it's not precisely poetry. Here's Anderson: “The book is subtitled 'A Novel in Verse,' but — as usual with Carson — neither 'novel' nor 'verse' quite seems to apply.”

You might remember a while back when Pixar released their pat formula for story telling? Richard Brody has some notes on their notes—it's a great piece of thinking, with a good takeaway: “The story is the equivalent of a musical melody or an architectural framework: a basis, not a goal; an element that may either be charmingly memorable or ingeniously conceived, but that is merely a starting point for a significant work, not a result.”