Bookmarks: Superhero Bill Cosby, scary Margaret Atwood, and the Poet of Swinging Suicides

Sundry links from around the Web:

• In honour of Leonard Cohen’s 75th birthday yesterday, 1 Heck of a Guy comes up with an incomplete list of Cohen’s many nicknames. Quillblog favourites: #22: Master of the Egg Salad Sandwich and #60: Poet of Swinging Suicides
• A 700-plus page “utopian fantasy” starring superheroes Bill Cosby and Yoko Ono? Yes, it’s Ralph Nader’s “quirky fiction debut” 
• Can’t get enough of Dan Brown mania? Here are 10 titles to tide you over after The Last Symbol tsunami 
• Philip Seymour Hoffman as The Giving Tree? EW‘s Shelf Life  picks classic children’s books they’d like to see given the Hollywood treatment 
• Margaret Atwood tells The New York Times why she scares herself 
• Despite previous concerns, the Philadelphia Free Library System is NOT shutting down  

Love letters by CanLit icons are for adults only

Canadian authors are well represented in a book of fictional love letters, titled Four Letter Word, which is being published by Knopf Canada in 2008. Prior to its release, Times Online is inviting readers to sign up for free excerpts, which will be sent to their inboxes beginning Oct. 29, by contributors such as Margaret Atwood and Leonard Cohen.

In the meantime, lonely hearts may find some consolation from a similar series of love letters published in The Walrus in 2005, which also featured contributions by Atwood and Cohen, as well as David Bezmozgis, Sheila Heti, M.G. Vassanji, and Jonathan Lethem.

That earlier series varied widely in terms of tone and delivery – from bald lasciviousness (Cohen: “When I caught her in the flesh / And floated on her hips…), to squalid romanticism (Bezmozgis: “My love has brought neither of us any happiness”), to outright weirdness (Lethem’s entry is addressed to and from inanimate objects) – but remained consistently G-rated. Times readers might be in for something a little racier: the promotion is prohibited to minors under the age of 18.

Cohen and the Academy

The movement to persuade the Nobel Prize for Literature committee to make Leonard Cohen the next recipient of the award seems to be gaining steam. John Mullan argues on the Guardian site that the quality and variety of Cohen’s work over the last 40 years makes him a perfect candidate for the award. The column also features some quotes from Paul Kennedy, the host of CBC Radio’s Ideas program who originally suggested the Cohen nomination. The problem for Cohen fans, as Mullan points out, is the “imperviousness to outside pressure of the secretive Swedish Academy committee that chooses the winner.”

Related links:
Read John Mullan’s column in the Guardian
Read about Paul Kennedy on the CBC site