RIP Christine Brooke-Rose, an experimental novelist who has died at eighty-nine. Quoth theNew York Times, she had “the ardor of a philologist, the fingers of a prestidigitator and the appetite of a lexivore, resulting in novels that exhilarated many critics and enervated others.”

The ALA’s list of 2011’s most-challenged books includes To Kill a Mockingbird, The Hunger Games, and My Mom’s Having a Baby! A Kid’s Month-by-Month Guide to Pregnancy, by Dori Hillestad Butler.

Amazing movie-title stills.

England’s poet laureate takes on the Pendle Witches. “This was a grisly affair, even by the debased standards of the day, with two of the women hanged at Lancaster castle aged over eighty and blind, another probably driven mad by a disfigured face with one eye lower than the other, and all ten convicted largely on the evidence of a nine-year-old child.”

You surely know O. Henry’s real name, and the pen names of the Brontes … but there are some real surprises on this list of authorial noms de guerre!

At the New York Public Library, Thoreau goes digital.

Ninety-six-year-old Herman Wouk’s latest novel, The Lawgiver, chronicles the making of a movie about Moses via “letters, memos, emails, journals, news articles, recorded talk, tweets, Skype transcripts, and text messages.”

A literary tattoo showdown.

The Man from U.N.C.L.E.contest rewards the winner, appropriately, with classic pulp.