Old Hag points to this NYT article on couples in which both partners are writers, a piece (tenuously) motivated by the phenom of Bill and Hillary’s dual (or is that dueling?) memoirs (“I felt punched in the gut!” “I slept on the couch!”). Bytes come from Colin and Kathryn Harrison, Ben Marcus and Heidi Julavits, J.D. McClatchy and Chip Kidd, and Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman. Go read it — how often do you get your lit news served on the Fashion & Style pages?

Incidentally, Chabon and Waldman both maintain interesting websites. Chabon’s serves as a repository for his essays, which a lot of people have been linking to lately. I’ll direct you to “At Nabokov’s House”, from a talk delivered in St. Petersburg:

His treatment of nostalgia leads me to the third thing that we love about Nabokov: his treatment, in general, of human emotions. Some people, I know, find Nabokov cool, even cold; aloof, Olympian, inhuman. Some people, picturing him with his killing jar and mounting pin, even call him a cruel writer. He is none of these; his characters are often cruel, and so are their fates, but in this regard I don’t think anyone could really argue that Nabokov’s version of the world and its denizens is unrealistic or simply a reflection of him. He often traffics in the less popular emotions: humiliation, chagrin, remorse, discomfiture. I think of Gogol and Chekhov and wonder if Russian writers have greater insight into the pain of human social interaction.

The Russians, and the makers of “The Office.”

Meanwhile, I stop by Waldman’s site every couple months or so for its booklog, “an absolutely faithful account of what I read.” Herself a mystery writer and novelist, Waldman is a great disher on books — forthright without being hair-raising, enthusiastic without being undiscerning. Her notes are like fortune-cookie reviews; good for building a library list. Here are two examples:

The Blindfold by Siri Hustvedt
Okay, so this is a good SHORT STORY COLLECTION but it is NOT a novel, and I really and truly resent being told that it is. As a novelist who spends a tremendous amount of time and energy worrying about the arc of her story and plot, it really pisses me off when publishers try to sell collections as novels. It does the author a disservice and makes a good book seem less well done.

Little Children by Tom Perrotta
I liked this book quite a bit, but you know what? He didn’t get the female character right. He doesn’t know what we talk about to one another. He doesn’t get it. Alas.