Links go-round

Thanks to a rather nasty bout of food poisoning that managed to mess up my evening and early morning, things might be rather sluggish, off or light today. Or all of the above. In any case:

The Whitbread Award nominees have been announced, and some serious heavy hitters are duking it out in the fiction category: the Booker Prize winner, the Orange Prize winner, and a previous Whitbread Overall winner. And Louis de Bernieres, just because.  Anyway, congrats to all nominees.

Speaking of awards, the Giller Prize will be handed out in a splashy ceremony tomorrow night. The G&M’s Rebecca Caldwell questions all the nominees on their background, who they are taking to the ceremony, and their realistic chances of winning.

Bloody hell–how’d it take so long for the uncensored version of LADY CHATTERLEY’s LOVER to get published in the UK? But amazingly it has, and the first printing has sold out.

If you’re in Edinburgh in early December, the two most successful crime writers in the country–Ian Rankin and Alexander McCall Smith–will be reading and signing at an event together. No doubt the hall will be packed to the gills.

Silver Bullet Comics catches up with Gary Phillips, a double threat as a crime novelist and a comic book writer with ANGELTOWN.

The New York Observer, in its Transom column, meets up with a couple of earnest young women who are starting a new library devoted to, uh, literature?! (Oh, so I guess you can’t surf for internet porn there. Oh well) and in the second column, describes Tom Wolfe’s launch party and why it would just be so cool to have more literary feuds.

Steven Levy of Newsweek revives his somewhat dormant Airplane Reading column to talk about what makes Alan Furst’s erudite WWII-set thrillers so incredibly good.

And finally, truly, some things are better left alone. If $1 billion dollars wasn’t going to make them get back together, what else would?