On the Books: Lost Dr. Seuss stories to be published as picture book

Theodor Geisel's golden years were the 1950s, when he published Horton Hears a Who! (1955), The Cat in the Hat (1957), and How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1957), as well as the screenplay for The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. He also published a few short stories in Redbook magazine. Random House is now publishing Horton and the Kwuggerbug and More Lost Stories, a collection of stories from the Redbook days, adding illustrations, and releasing it as a picture book in September. [The Guardian]

Before his untimely death last year, Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist Oscar Hijuelos was working on a novel more ambitious than anything else he wrote: It's a 859-page historical novel about Mark Twain and Henry Morton Stanley, the famous explorer who found missionary Robert Livingstone in central Africa. He finished the manuscript before he died, and now Hijuelos' widow is pursuing publication. The novel, Twain and Stanley Enter Paradise, will be published in the fall of 2015 along with an unpublished short story. Hijuelos' wife also said he had another 700-page manuscript written, but she doesn't currently plan to publish it. "I see Twain and Stanley as Oscar's crowning achievement," she said. [The New York Times]

Since leaving the White House, George W. Bush has become something of a polymath artist. (The quality of his work is up for debate.) Not only does he paint, he's also writing a biography of his dad, H.W. [Associated Press]

Michelle Huneven writes about the unpleasant experience of discovering she's a character in one of T.C. Boyle's novels. "In real life, T. C. called me La Huneven, and here he called his heroine, Ruth Dershowitz, La Dershowitz. Ruth was a talentless writer who aspired to literary fiction while writing restaurant reviews and articles for Cosmo. Hey! I wrote restaurant reviews! And I'd once written an article for Cosmo! Was this, then, what Tom really thought of me? That I was a talentless airhead poseur trying to break into the hallowed world of literature?" [The Paris Review]

Ira Glass may not think much of Shakespeare, but he's in good company: neither did George Bernard Shaw or Leo Tolstoy. The difference, Adam Kirsch writes, is that Glass didn't engage with the text, whereas for Tolstoy and Shaw, "Shakespeare stood in their way as an indestructible obstacle, representing a way of writing that they opposed because they could not practice it." [The New Republic]

The coolest Penguin paperback book covers of all time. [The New Republic]

From "Bluebeard" to "wellerism," The Guardian rounds up a list of literary characters whose names are now part of the English language. [The Guardian]

Want to read more poetry? There's an app for that. [The New York Times]