1. According to The Observer, Kanye West is planning to shoot a short film — much like his 30-minute clip for “Runaway” — in the Middle East. Says their source: “There’s a lot of preconceived notions and stereotypes about Emiratis and Qataris, which Westerners often play up. [His reps] discussed how Kanye is looking to bridge the cultural divide and break misconceptions.”

2. It looks like Darren Aronofsky may have found someone besides super busy Christian Bale to play Noah. The director is reportedly eying Russell Crowe to star in his epic film, with rumors of Liam Neeson being cast as its villain. [via Slashfilm]

3. Apparently Scott Speedman would be totally down with the idea of a Felicity reunion — but there’s a not so tiny catch. “But if I’m doing a reunion, I’m doing it fat, that’s for sure,” he told E!. “My character’s a giant fat guy.”

4. Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska died yesterday at the age of 88 from lung cancer; despite a career spanning six decades, she only published 400 poems during her lifetime. “There is a trash bin in my room,” Szymborska once explained. “A poem written in the evening is read again in the morning. It does not always survive.” [via Gawker]

5. This is what it sounds like when Orbital joins forces with Zola Jesus. Wonky, the UK dance duo’s first album in eight years, drops on April 3rd here in the US.

Bonus Buzz: 15 Examples of How Cereal Boxes Have Changed Over Time

In contrast to the widespread puzzlement that characterized Herta Mueller’s Nobel Prize win last year, the international response to Mario Vargas Llosa’s honor is hardly one of surprise. Consistently topping out the Academy’s rumored short-list, the Peruvian author’s long-overdue tribute breaks a Euro-centric spell that has overly privileged European writers in the past six years. It is also the first time since Gabriel García Marquez’s win in 1982 that a South American author has won the prestigious prize — a fact made all the more timely with the recent news of Granta’s first ever “Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists” issue.

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1. Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa has been awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. He is the first South American to win the prize since Gabriel Garcia Marquez in 1982. [via NYT]
2. Christina Hendricks once sold a ticket to Johnny Depp’s birthday party for $50 in order to have money to buy groceries. [via Showbiz Spy]
3. Read a long-lost poem from Ted Hughes about Sylvia Plath’s suicide, which was recently discovered in the British Library archive. [via Daily Mail]
4. An entire upcoming episode of The Office will be dedicated to Glee. That’s weird, right? [via EW]
5. A State Department clerk has been charged with using her government computer to gather personal information on more than a hundred celebrities and their families. [via NYP]

Bonus link: Watching Movies … in the Movies

Like a mischievous kid who rattles a jar full of bees just to see what happens, José Saramago threw his characters into extraordinary situations to see how they’d react. The Portuguese Nobel laureate was a chronicler of the unknowable, an architect of the implausible, a student of human psychology where ethical codes or the pesky laws of nature would normally intervene. He sought first to confound, second to clarify.

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José Saramago has the ability to simultaneously seduce and piss off his audience more than perhaps any other living writer. From absurdist premises to an ascetic approach to punctuation, his fiction breeds a kind of intellectual isolation that becomes addictive with each turned page. His novels, for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1998, consist of complex allegories, fantastical scenarios, rewritten histories, and the occasional inside literary joke, each of which is at once stunningly executed and maddeningly disorienting. It comes as a welcome shift, then, that Saramago’s most recent release, The Notebook, is a work of nonfiction, an overview of contemporary society that offers clarity and sobering directness without sacrificing any of the author’s love/hate appeal.

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The third in his series of fictionalized memoirs, J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime questions the author’s own relevance as a human being.

In the process of understanding why readers care about who he is, Coetzee tries to show himself as an awkward, un-sexualized man who is no more worthy of public curiosity than anyone else. Featuring a fictional interviewer, out-of-frame notes, and a series of less-than-flattering third-party accounts, Summertime is a deeply sardonic but ultimately entrancing self-portrait of the Nobel laureate.

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Romanian-born, German writer Herta Mülller was tapped for the prestigious Nobel Prize in Literature today. Persecuted for her depictions of life under Nicolae Ceauşescu in communist Romania, Mülller is a voice for the repressed citizens behind the iron curtain — a detail clearly not lost on the Swedish Academy given the 20th anniversary of communism’s collapse in Europe. Read More »