A review of Once Upon a Time Proletarian, by the Chinese novelist and director Xiaolu Guo, and a review of her new movie, "She, a Chinese," starring Lu Huang (in the photo).

On the 10th anniversary of Paul Bowles's death, Paul Theroux remembers the writer and traveller who set him on his way.

Ed Ruscha has dedicated a new project to Kerouac’s “On the Road."

The November issue of Playboy features French actor Gilles Marini, who has appeared in Sex and the City and Dancing With the Stars, in a racy fashion pictorial featuring men’s styles inspired by Paul Schrader’s film, “The Comfort of Strangers.”

Twitterature, in which two freshmen summarize everything from Medea to Madame Bovary in 20 tweets or less.  But one book gets just one tweet: "For Twitterature of On the Road by Jack Kerouac, please see On the Road by Jack Kerouac."

A little essay on Hemingway's "grace under pressure": "I did not care what (the world) was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it."

Under the influence of Heart of Darkness, a new novel explores themes of colonisation, identity and the relationships between settlers, the land and the Aborigines in Australia.

The Sheltering Sky is 60 this fall, and the Times reassesses Bowles.

Xiaolu Guo, author of A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, has a new book.

Tangier, where William Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch (50 this year) and Paul Bowles completed The Sheltering Sky.

Movie buffs have launched a campaign to rescue the beach of the 1971 classic, Death In Venice.

A new "restored edition" of Hemingway's "A Moveable Feast" is being published, and it's stirring up a little controversy.  The NY Times has a couple of articles, here and here.