Monday miscellany

• "... it would be better if the computer said: 'If you like Gone with the Wind, you need to read Beloved.' " That's Tayari Jones on Amazon's witless automated books-you'll-like suggestions.

• "I often bless all novelists." That's Charles Darwin on his artistic tastes later in life, from an interesting post about Darwin, brain plasticity and aging at Alvaro Fernandez's site Sharp Brains. The heads-up on this came via Moby Lives.

• Also from Moby Lives comes word that "a group of writers including Russell Banks, Chris Hedges, Francine Prose, Robert Haas and Mark Kurlansky have drafted a letter they hope to place as an ad in The New York Review of Books and The Nation" calling on President-elect Obama to reverse his campaign position on the war in Afghanistan and instead withdraw all U.S. troops.

• Finally, from a mass message to the journal's email list calling for entries to its annual contest and announcing the imminent publication of its Fall 2008 issue, Cream City Review notes that the new issue will feature "poems from Jennifer Perinne, BJ Best and Gary Soto; fiction from Shelley Ettinger and Susan Robison; comics from David King and an interview with Kevin Brockmeier." OK, call me self-serving for noting this but it would be more accurate to say I'm flattered and surprised that my name got included in an advertising blurb alongside some well known writers. Cool.