Bwah! Thank you for linking to that, Strega.

Jilli, have you read the book, Dragonfly, by Frederick S. Durbin? I'm almost done with it and it seems like something you'd like.

Given what I've heard about her relationships later on in the series, that line is frigg'n hilarious.

Snerk.

OMG.

They said "werewang".

If I weren't on a call I'd laugh myself silly.

Anita claims that she "knew vampires like some people knew horses."

Didn't they disprove that rumor about Catherine the Great?

Dude, who cares?

Werewang.

Jilli, have you read the book, Dragonfly, by Frederick S. Durbin? I'm almost done with it and it seems like something you'd like.

Nope, haven't read it. I'll add it to the list of Books to Find.

An interesting bit of literary history noted in Slate:

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Megan Marshall, author, The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism

I was lucky to be present at Authors Ridge in Concord's Sleepy Hollow Cemetery last June for the reunion of Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne—after a 142-year separation. The couple, whose happy marriage had been so powerful an example of romantic love that even marriage-skeptic Margaret Fuller envied the pair, had been buried with an ocean between them. Nathaniel died first in 1864 at age 59, borne to a grave just yards away from Henry Thoreau's by pallbearers including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Franklin Pierce, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

His grieving widow left transcendental Concord for Europe, dying in London seven years later, to be buried in Kensal Green Cemetery, where her defunct neighbors included Trollope and Thackeray. By the 21st century, that real estate was no longer good enough for her, or for the order of Dominican nuns founded by the Hawthornes' youngest daughter, Rose (now up for canonization for her good works), which had assumed responsibility for tending Sophia's grave.

When an enormous hawthorn tree, planted at the time of Sophia's burial, withered in recent years, and then collapsed on the London gravesite, the Dominican sisters took it as a sign that it was time to bring Sophia home. Her entry on Kensal Green's registry of literary luminaries now reads: "Sophia Peabody Hawthorne (1809-1871) ... remains translated to Concord, Massachusetts, USA, 2006."

And while we're on past lives—reading Robert Richardson's new biography William James in the Maelstrom of American Modernism reminded me of everything I love about the genre. In his preface, Richardson writes that "biography begins in the mysteries of temperament, lives in narrative, but aims beyond it ... to resurrection." Sophia Hawthorne literally sprung from her grave, William James resurrected literarily—it was a good year!

Oh and for P-C, from the same Slate Year in Culture review:

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Lorrie Moore, author, Birds of America

Theater! Especially the moving and ghostly last acts of Faith Healer and Grey Gardens: Ralph Fiennes' transcendent rendition of Brian Friel's soliloquy of death and Christine Ebersole singing "Another Winter in a Summer Town," Grey Gardens' one good song (which like the Friel is about the doom involved with losing one's powers, especially if those powers were capricious to begin with).

Aw, thanks, Hec, even though I have no bloomin' idea what she's talking about.

Also: OMG, I heard she had a new story! In the New Yorker or something!! Anyone know where I can find it?