McSweeney's Is Taking Over the World

(NEWSER) - Dave Eggers, author, editor, and professed lover of print, is hatching a plan to save newspapers. Or at least a modern version of them. Eggers tells the Rumpus that he and his crew at McSweeney's will publish their version of a daily newspaper in September. It will exist for one day only but will include a business plan that can be replicated by others across the country. The general idea: Small paper, high quality. More»

Received intelligence about plot at Jaipur literary event

(NEWSER) - Salman Rushdie has dropped out of India's top literary festival after hearing that assassins may have been planning to attend—and kill him. Powerful clerics had protested the author's attendance at the Jaipur festival, which opened today and was to feature Rushdie as a speaker. But "intelligence sources in Maharashtra and Rajasthan" informed him "that paid assassins from the Mumbai underworld may be on their way to Jaipur to 'eliminate' me," he said in a statement, according to the BBC . More»

After two no-show years, this could be their final vigil

(NEWSER) - Beginning on Jan. 19, 1949, a mysterious visitor marked Edgar Allan Poe's birthday by laying three red roses and a bottle of cognac on the author's Baltimore grave. But fans of the gothic scribe worry that the tradition may be resting six feet under as well: The birthday visitor last struck in 2009, on the 200th anniversary of Poe's birth. Both 2010 and 2011 passed with no sign of the "Poe toaster," who typically arrived between midnight and dawn (though imposters did attend last year, including a man who arrived in a limo). The Poe House and Museum's curator says he'll wait one final time tonight before declaring the tradition dead, reports the AP . More»

Italy plans to exterminate rats on Montecristo

(NEWSER) - Any buried treasure on the island of Montecristo will soon be covered in rat poison. Facing a massive rat infestation, Italian authorities plan to drop 26 tons of poison on the 4-square-mile island that inspired Alexandre Dumas' famous novel The Count of Monte Cristo, the Telegraph reports. Black rats may have arrived there years ago as stowaways, and multiplied until one exists for every square yard of island, biologists say. More»

Biographer is sure drawing depicts author

(NEWSER) - There are only two accepted portraits of Jane Austen, one based on the other—but an Austen biographer believes she's found a third. Paula Byrne's husband bought her a graphite drawing sold as an "imaginary portrait" of the writer, labeled "Miss Jane Austin." Byrne says it's anything but imaginary. "That genre doesn't exist, and this looks too specific, too like the rest of her family, to have been drawn from imagination," she tells the Guardian. Go there or to the BBC (which plans to air a documentary on the image) to see it. More»