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Boom time for Stollywood: Cold (War) River stories take bizarre new turn: The Movies' Billion-Dollar Month For the first time, American movie theatres sold more than a billion dollars worth of tickets.

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: This Genteel Racket: Meeting an Untimely End
One of the hardest things in art, outside of creating it, is to be that very first person who looks at an unknown and his or her work and says: I like it. Any idiot can second the motion. But to look at an unknown and say, 'You, yes you, you are worthy'—that is different. That means taking a risk, to say yes where probably dozens have already said no. It is also what changes the course of an art form. And this is why I sometimes nurse the suspicion that the real gatekeeper of American literature is not the publisher, not the critic, and not Jack Warner's fabled 'schmucks with Underwoods'—i.e., writers. No, it is the schmuck with a Rolodex: the literary agent
• Successful Art - It's Who You Know
• · · See Also Burdened by Books: Jim Fusilli quit his job reviewing fiction for the Boston Globe
• · · · See Also Bookworm Gordon Brown: Modern politicians don't read [Brown's speech on the great success of the British Council internationally (part 1) ] [Brown's speech (part 2) ]
• · · · · Garton Ash witnessed the power of freedom in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland in the late 1980s Making a world of difference
• · · · · · David Holthouse received over 2,000 e-mails after writing about his plot to kill: I'm a journalist who wrote the toughest story of my life, a story that explains my life. And now I'm getting on with that life and moving to a new story