From the proverbial ashes of Flatmancrooked: Nouvella Books has launched, with plans to publish four  limited-edition novellas per year. The first announced book is Matthew Salesses’s The Last Repatriate.

• Jon Reiss on Vanessa Veselka’s fantastic novel Zazen: “Vesekla…pulls no punches in her first novel, concocting a miasma of the collective politics of the radical counterculture.  It’s a world of weekend anarchist tofu scramble eaters, transgendered ukulele players and eco terrorists; a world that the mainstream media, or at least the literati has recently taken a heightened interest in. “

• Matt Bell announces his next book: Cataclysm Baby will be released by Mud Luscious Press in 2012.

• Would you like to see and hear a host of Australian musicians covering Nick Cave’s “The Ship Song”? We suspect that you might.

• Take the Handle relaunches, with a George Plimpton-themed shindig happening next week.