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I'll shamelessly copy from other bloggers who have a weekly post on literary news and interesting links. Obviously, I'll never be constant enough to respect the weekly schedule, but seen that I enjoy these posts (very post-modern and salad-bowl-like, to say something "hip"), I'll dish them out to you too:

#1 Did you know that Abbottabad, the town where Osama Bin Laden was killed, has taken its name from an English general of the British Raj era? The awkward thing is that James Abbott has written a poem about this small town, calling it simply "Abbottabad". "The Guardian" has found it and called it "one of the worst poems ever written". If you feel strong enough, read it here.

#2 Take a brief look at vintage, old-fashioned covers of "Lolita" offered by Flavorwire. There is also a video with an interview with old Vlad, where he is showing us his favourite covers of "Lolita". 

#3 Maybe it's a new dawn for Italian contemporary literature. Igiaba Scego, author of "La Mia Casa è Dove Sono" was awareded the Mondello Prize. The news is that she is an Italian writer of Somali origin. Minority writers, in fact, had been so far excluded from the literary prizes.

# 4 Yet another biography of Mahatma Gandhi has been published. This one, nonetheless, written by a certain Joseph Lelyveld  and titled "Great Soul. Gandhi and his Struggle with India", suggests that India's spiritual father had, in his years in South Africa, a homoerotic, if not homosexual, relatioship with a man called Hermann Kallenbach, a German Jewish bodybuilder. Needless to say, the book has caused scandal in India. The New York Times, in his review, promptly ignores the topic.

#5 Another round-up from Flavorwire, this time to revise (or discover) the Bard's bawdy jokes. 

Norman Mailer's house

#6 Ernesto Sabato has died. He was a famous Argentinian novelist and essayist, famous also because he led a commission to investigate the crimes committed during the dictatorship. The New York Times calls him "the conscience of Argentina".

#7 The Huffington Post takes us to see the house of some famous writers. Among the strangest there is Truman Capote's house (how could it have been otherwise?) and Norman Mailer's, which once had a hammock and a trapeze swing to climb it.  

#8 This is not exactly fresh, but have you tried Ron Charles' Totally Hip Video Book Reviews? I love them! Here the famous critic of "a major American newspaper" (the Washington Post) makes a spectacle of himself with a funny and quick review of Jonathan Franzen's "Freedom", which has recently been published in Italy as well.

#9 Do you think the world of literature is a happy Republic of Love? Well, you're wrong: the JRR Tolkien Estate has contested a forthcoming book which features the author of "Lord of the Rings" as one of its characters.

#10 Rudyard Kipling was a reporter in Italy during the First World War, did you know? Hemingway was not the only one to do the nasty job; this is what "La Guerra nelle Montagne. Impressioni dal Fronte" seems to tell us. The book contains Kipling writings of his Italian period.