An excellent piece in Salon on why The Wire is not like Dickens. A common weakness in many manuscripts is that they’ve overdosed on showing rather than telling, with the result that they read like madcap episodes of Dr Who: everything is foreground action. Laura Miller states the case for the particular form of storytelling that is the novel, and points out how stories are told differently on screen. (Should you be writing a screenplay instead?) Some great insights.

Why dictionaries are not wiktionaries, from the Guardian.

Also from the Guardian: Top Ten Literary Otters.

And a fun book trailer (for Where’d You Go, Bernadette, by Maria Semple), which illustrates the challenges of getting the pitch for your book right.