Another month, another literary theme: According to the Emerging Writers Network, June is Novella Month, and a crucial part of the celebration thus far has been defining “novella.” Suggests author Kyle Minor: “The novella is the form where you get to stretch the short story past its place of elegant concision, so instead of breaking in the right place, it goes on and on past the right place, the way life does…” A novel(la) idea, indeed.

Everyone loves a list. That’s cause they’re:1). a quick read; 2). assertive; 3). curiosity-piquing; 8). logically organized. (Except, of course, when they’re not.) Still, not everyone in the literary world appreciated a list in the New Yorker Summer Fiction issue—“20 Writers Under 40”—in which a score of writers were recognized for capturing “the inventiveness and vitality of contemporary American fiction.” Feeling rivalrous, the Telegraph proposed its own list—“Britain’s 20 Best Novelists Under 40”— and HTML Giant kicked the discussion up a notch (or, refreshingly, down) by offering a list of the “Top 400 Writers Worth Watching Under the Age of 1.” According to HTML Editor Blake Butler, selecting the baby scribes was a difficult process. “Unfortunately there were some fantastic young pen holders who’d just had their first birthday party who we had to cross off the list,” he wrote. “I also crossed off those babies who didn’t quite have that look in their eye. You know what I mean.”

Speaking of HTML Giant, one of the site’s contributors, Ben Spivey, recently co-founded a new small publishing initiative, Blue Square Press. The first release will be Spivey’s novel, Flowing in the Gossamer Fold. Meanwhile, on the Featherproof Books website, you can download new (free!) mini books from Patrick Somerville and Mary Miller. Soon the Chicago-based press will move into a new shared space with Green Lantern Gallery & Press, featuring a bookstore, café/bar, art gallery, offices, and other bells and whistles.

Via Literago: The king of King-Cat Comics, John Porcellino, has more zine and comics available through his mailorder distribution co. Spit and a Half. (Think: Gabrielle Bell, Lilli Carré, and of course, King-Cat Comics and Stories.) In other Midwesternness: Stop Smiling/Melville House Books has released Listen to the Echoes, a collection of Ray Bradbury interviews conducted by biographer Sam Weller, as well as How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop, by music journalist Dave Tompkins.

There are books about audio—and then there are audio books. A British writer, Nathan Dunne, is releasing Underwood, a new twice-yearly publication produced as a vinyl LP. “The MP3 has an alien digital gloss,” Dunne told the Telegraph . “It’s streamlined, corporate… Listening to a short story on vinyl is the purest antidote to that.” Also for the record: singer-songwriter Bill Callahan is putting out a new book via Drag City. Titled Letters to Emma Bowlcut, it’s an epistolary novel that’s been years in the making.

The AIGA recently selected the best in book design from 2009. Check out the winning books and covers. There are some real lookers!

The legendary Shakespeare & Company Bookshop is launching a literary publication, Paris Magazine. Edited by Fatema Ahmed, formed ed. of Granta, the magazine will feature fiction, nonfiction, and illustration. The bookstore will also start awarding 10,000 euro (that’s $12, 292!) every two years to the author of the best novella (defined as 20,000–30,000 words). So in other words, writers, time to start stretching those short stories…

Photo by Per on Flickr