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Book News: New Claims About Nixon In Posthumous Robert Bork Memoir

By: Annalisa Quinn // February 27, 2013
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The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

  • According to the AP, a memoir out next month from Robert Bork, the solicitor general under President Nixon, claims that Nixon promised him the next open spot on the Supreme Court after Bork fired Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox in 1973's "Saturday Night Massacre." Bork, who died last December, was ultimately nominated to the High Court by President Reagan in 1987. But he was rejected by the Senate — after hearings that "marked the modern battle lines over judicial nominations," as NPR's Nina Totenberg has said.

  • Martha Graham Cracker, a legendary Philadelphia drag performer (whose costumes, incidentally, are very Seussian), became a subject of controversy this week after she was asked — and then uninvited — by an afterschool program to read Dr. Seuss to children for National Read Across America Day. A local church will host her instead.

  • Course syllabi from W.H. Auden and David Foster Wallace.

  • English actor and probable vampire Russell Brand is working on another revelatory "Booky Wook," which will delve into his marriage to singer Katy Perry. What exactly is wrong with just calling it a "book"?

  • Writer (and former NPR NewsPoet) Paisley Rekdal won the $10,000 Rilke Prize for her book of poems, Animal Eye.

  • Vampires in the Lemon Grove author Karen Russell on missing the word "Hallelujah" during Lent in an interview with author Claire Vaye Watkins: "I was raised Catholic and one of my favorite times of year was right after Lent, Easter Sunday, when you can say 'Hallelujah' again. I don't know if any other kid felt the famine of Hallelujahs."

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