A round-up for your weekend ...

• If only we could have more books like this: "'Wetlands' opens in a hospital room after an intimate shaving accident. It gives a detailed topography of Helen's hemorrhoids, continues into the subject of anal intercourse and only gains momentum from there, eventually reaching avocado pits as objects of female sexual satisfaction and--here is where the debate kicks in--just possibly female empowerment."
• The Believer interviews Tom McCarthy, author of Bookstorm favorite Remainder: "Oh, I was just reading [Mark Z. Danielewski] today. I've been reading Only Revolutions. Here's the thing, right, Finnegans Wake--Joyce thought it was the last novel. He thought this was the novel in which the destiny of literature would realize itself. It was the event that we have been waiting for all of these years. And he literally thought it would be the last novel. It would be (a) unnecessary and (b) impossible to write a novel, I mean a proper novel, a serious novel, after Finnegans Wake. Now, in a way, if you have this linear-progressive view of literary or cultural history, then it is quite hard to see that he wasn't right. But I have tried to argue, in the past, that he was exactly, I mean exactly, wrong--that Finnegans Wake is actually the first book. It is the source code of the novel. It contains everything from the picaresque Spanish, to the Anglo-Saxon novel, through Shakespeare and everything else. It eviscerates them and lays them open, but doesn't resolve anything."
• Salman Rushdie on what he's learned: "If I could meet anyone over lunch? Shakespeare. How do you do it? For a long time my question was: But was Shakespeare good in bed? And I'm afraid the terrible answer is that he probably was."