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• John Gabree, the author and former Newsday book reviewer who created Santa Monica's late L.A. (The Bookstore), writes a wide-ranging blog that he calls Impractical Proposals. He noted yesterday that the Santa Monica city libraries now offer free wi-fi.
• Rodger Jacobs contributes a piece to Jeffrey Wells' site Hollywood Elsewhere on being haunted by the memory of the late actor and playwright Jason Miller. Jacobs posted a query on Craigslist some weeks back looking for friends of Miller's and anecdotes for a play he is writing.
• Lydia Millet has sold Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, about a pornographer with messianic delusions who spins wildly out of control in Los Angeles and mounts a PR campaign to make himself famous, to Soft Skull Press. Also in the deal is Everyone's Pretty, described in Publishers Lunch as "depicting the teleporting of three famous atomic scientists - Oppenheimer, Fermi and Leo Szilard - from the moment of the Trinity test on July 16th, 1945 to present-day Santa Fe, where they embark on a campaign to rid the world of nuclear weapons only to find that Christian evangelicals believe Oppenheimer to be the Second Coming."
• Former L.A. Times reporter Laurie Becklund is helping Zaiab Salmi write The Pilot's Daughter, which sold to Gotham. Publishers Lunch says it's "the first woman's story from within the intimate circle in Iraq, by the founder of international aid organization Women for Women, about how one lives the abuse of power, from a man you call 'Uncle' (her father was pilot for Saddam Hussein)."
• Israeli novelist Orly Castel-Bloom speaks about A Fragile Life: Terror and Satire in Contemporary Israel in a free Zócalo special event at Wilshire Boulevard Temple, Oct. 21 at 7 p.m.