Here's a series of words one never thought would be strung together in one sentence!

Five years ago, Irish Catholic born/Muslim convert, Micheal Muhammad Knight, of upstate New York, wrote "The Taqwacores" as his way of mending "the rift between being an observant Muslim and an angry American youth".

The book, which is populated with characters like Rabeya, a girl who plays guitar onstage wearing a burqa, Fasiq a pot-smoker and Jehangir, a drunk, has struck a chord with disenfranchised Arab-American youth who have been feeling stigmatized since the Sept. 11 attacks.

To read more about "The Taqwacores" and the movie based on the book, check out the article in the New York Times.

The cafes, sidewalks and bookstores of Mutanabi street, the intellectual core of Baghdad have fully re-opened after months of closures and curfews as a result of a bombing back in March of 07. Read New York Times' Iraq From the Inside for the full story.

Yesterday the NYT reported on the departure of Becky Saletan as the head of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's adult trade division.

Wow! Seems not a week goes by without the company making it into the news! 

A few clicks later I stumble on this entry strangely dated 2007 but mainly commented on yesterday.

What a great idea! Rejections are universal but they have a particular meaning when one has spent months or years toiling in isolation over blank pages, words, commas and periods.

With news that publishers, authors and Google have finally arrived at an agreement for scanning and digitizing all the books in the world - the argument for out-of-print books never being out of print again remains true, as well as that of inspiring innovators. The net made dictionaries, phonebooks, maps and news more current; it opened unimagined venues for filmmakers, musicians, and burgeoning enterpreneurs - one can only dream of the potentials it can offer writers, editors and publishers.