Children murder one another in a multitude of gruesome and memorable ways in “The Hunger Games,” deploying spears, arrows, rocks, venomous wasps, mutant wolves and their bare hands in a televised gladiatorial death match.

The juvenile slaughterfest depicted in the film and its source material, Suzanne Collins’ trilogy of bestselling young adult novels, may give audiences (particularly parents) pause — is this what contemporary entertainment has come to? But violence committed by and against children has a long, grisly tradition in literature — as an allegory for adult cruelty, a representation of the emotional volatility of adolescence and a tension-raiser for audiences.

AWP: your yearly chance to spend too much money on too many journals you’ll never read; to drink in proximity to C.K. Williams (who more or less travels with the AWP Conference, moving from camp to camp and collecting potable rainwater in discarded totebags); to make sure the editorial board of the journal who rejected your story or poem three times is at least fairly unattractive, physically; to, above all, not feel quite so weird telling the person next to you that you are, in fact, a writer.

The Association of Writers & Writing Programs’s annual conference, the largest of its type in the country, pulls writers of all ages and genres away from their laptops, notepads and typewriters (ugh) and toward a new city every year. This year saw the return of The Conference to Chicago, site of the 2009 conference and an all-around welcoming city for artists. This year was the biggest yet for AWP, with 10,000 writers descending on Lake Michigan for four nights of panels, readings, and business-card-handling. But the (not-so) secret of AWP is its ability to feel at once overwhelming—it becomes hard to tell, when surrounded by so many, which mustache is sincere and which is ironic—and entirely intimate, as if you’re surrounded by 9,999 potential lifelong friends.

Before average, urban, single women were dreaming of taking on life with a cosmo in hand and Manolo-clad feet, they were coveting a life of oversized sunglasses and profitable trips to the powder room. Fabulous, single icons have been few and far between, but it is without question that Holly Golightly is the icon against which all others are measured. Whether on the page or on the screen, Holly is the embodiment of the charming, elusive woman every single girl imagines herself to be. From book to film Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Truman Capote, 1958 and Blake Edwards, 1961) takes a radical turn, but what’s interesting is that Holly herself (played by Audrey Hepburn in the film) is unchanged. Instead, it is the situations she faces, and the way in which her story is told, that create two wildly different stories about one very interesting woman.

Holly Golightly, in either variation, is an odd choice for an icon. She is, as her agent proclaims, “nuts”. She is delusional, insecure and yet somehow equally naïve and cunning. She has lived a tragic life that has left her a broken person, but she has managed to dress up this damage and make it aspirational. Every person who has lived has experienced some form of pain, so it is easy to understand how one could see Holly as someone to admire, but I firmly believe that if Breakfast at Tiffany’s had never ventured from the page, Holly would have been just another exceptional, but forgotten character.     

Here, book and movie rely so heavily on one another, that it is difficult to determine which is served more.

“There were always books in one’s home back then,” the ripened, white-haired literary lion said, reflecting on his youth in the 1930s from the stage of the Writers Guild (WGA) Theater in Beverly Hills in the summer of 2006. “And there were magazines with words, not just pictures like today.”

John Updike’s appearance at the WGA Theater that evening came in the waning days of an exhaustive and expansive global tour to support and promote his (then) new novel, Terrorist, an underestimated contribution to the catalogue of 9/11 Literature.

SEATTLE — According to his mother (in a position to know), Bradley Craft drew before he talked. Some children drop their obsession with drawing once they start to read and write, but Craft never quit.

Even a lifelong immersion in words as a bibliophile and bookseller didn’t choke off his drawing instinct. At Stacey’s, the venerated and now-closed San Francisco book store, Craft created literary caricatures for bookstore posters, sketching the hills and valleys of faces like that of California author Amy Tan. For his own amusement he labored over images of his 19th-century literary idols—Dickens, Thackeray. He even drew modern literary titans like Margaret Atwood in 19th-century dress (George Sand’s dress, to be specific).