Susana Case has a new book out, Elvis Presley’s Hips & Mick Jagger’s Lips. We were lucky to hear some previews when she read at Cornelius Eady’s AWP off-site event.

Ann Cefola is one of 85 poets from 7 countries tagged to post a poem each day, in Found Poetry Review’s Pulitzer Remix. You can receive these poems, extracted from Pulitzer winning books, in your inbox all month.

Connotation Press‘s guest editor, Adam Tavel, has posted an interview with Eric Anderson, who talks about his approach to writing, putting together a book, finding a title, and his cover art. Read some new poems by Eric at the end of the interview.

In the review review’s interview, Dan Chaon discusses “What Writers Can Learn From Rock Stars.” Chaon is a big proponent of annual anthologies as a window onto contemporary fiction, and he complains that young writers don’t read enough of their contemporaries. I read a critique of this view on another blog–I don’t recall which blog–where a young fiction author complains in turn that too much contemporary fiction is boring and predictable. But he didn’t give a single example. I think if you’re going to call out your contemporaries for sub-par writing you’d best be prepared to back it up, otherwise it’s just sour grapes. Apart from that, I read Chaon as putting forth the notion that the artist exists in context of the art of his or her time, and that to be in touch with that context is the only way you can partake of its conversation, of the evolution of the form in your time–even if that participation consists of you rejecting what your contemporaries are up to and going in a whole nother direction. This is not that different from saying writers should be exposed to the canon. We do not create in a vaccuum.

Re-Digi, a snall company which opened a resale platform for songs purchased from such digital retailers as iTunes, lost in court in a case that pits copyright (intellectual propery rights) against the “first sale doctrine” which is the legal principle by which you are allowed to resell a book, for example, which you purchased from someone else, even though said book remains under copyright. What I draw from this mess is that our laws are drastically outpaced by our technology. If anybody out there has the vision of how this conflict is resolved without decimating the ability of author and publisher to garner even a modest income stream from their labors, I am all ears. The power of the internet, and of digital expression in general, is changing the way we read, the way we communicate, and the nature of commerce–even the nature of what constitutes an “object” and what “owning” said object really means.

Welcome to the carnival, please pass the motion-sickness meds…