Paris’ historic Shakespeare and Company Bookstore (no relation to Shakespeare & Co. in NY) has a new mural!  Artist Badaude, who has a charming, unpretentious website that makes me want to see the mural even more, is interviewed at BOMB Magazine, and the article includes a slide show of the new work.

Elsewhere, Abroad

• Historic photos of the Orient have been exhibited at the Hamburg Museum of Ethnology in Germany, where they have been stored, forgotten, for decades.
• PEN American Center has written a letter to Obama for help in the release of writer-dissident-activist Liu Xiaobo. Daily Beast reports.
• Jakarta Fashion Week in pictures (is actually pretty cool).

Pushing the Literary “Limits”

• Excerpts from the Literary Review‘s annual Bad Sex in Fiction award.
• Is FLOW a “movement”?  Could you read it on the subway?
• Malcolm Gladwell responded to Steven Pinker, who reviewed his new book “What the Dog Saw.”  To prolong the tackfulness, Pinker responds to Gladwell’s response. To me, this is the problem with blogging.

Interesting Interviews

• From The Rumpus interview (in July) with National Book Award winner Colum McCann: “Every novel is a failure.”  Ugh.
• A lovely memoir piece, “Joan Didion Crosses the Street,” from V.L. Hartmann at The Morning News.
• Werner Herzog is weird, probably brilliantly insane.