On Thanksgiving Eve, Andri Lynn Jeffers allegedly walked into a northern Arizona gas station and demanded money from the cashier. When he turned Jeffers down, she announced that she had a bomb underneath her sweater and threatened to blow up the place, like how they do on teevee.

Take a picturesque location—Boulders Beach in South Africa, in this case—a brave little penguin, and a dash of suspenseful buildup, all set to Vangelis' "Chariots of Fire," and what do you get? You get one awesome animal video!

Galleycat says that employees of a certain large publishing house will be locked out of the office until Monday morning while exterminators deal with a bedbug infestation there. An inside tipster tells us which publisher it is:

Scandal- and bad-hair-ridden ex-Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich was spotted at the Flatiron offices of Macmillan, the book publisher. Blagojevich, who loves poetry as much as he loves profanity, must surely have a memoir in him.

Before inviting the web to create a collaborative novel using a wiki in 2007, Jeremy Ettinghausen asked, "Can a community write a novel?" The answer is yes but a terrible one! A year later the Penguin publisher told researchers at De Montfort University (Penguin's partner in the project), "It's the best thing I've…

As summer overdoses and dies, so do our excursions to Fire Island. And so this is our season finale, as it were, of Rod Townsend's adventures among the gays, recording the conversations of their native environment. See ya, gays!

As part of their continuing efforts to make endless re-releases of classic books at least somewhat interesting, Penguin has lately been experimenting with different cover design strategies. Across the pond, Penguin UK has hit on an ultra-minimalist approach: no cover at all. That is, they're releasing six classics…

Inspired by last year's tome on 70 years of cover designs at Penguin, this Flickr gallery attempts to collect examples of the last few decades' worth of Penguin/Pelican jackets. If anything, the starkly crude, mod, and/or trippy designs are testaments to doing a lot with relatively limited graphic resources. Of…

As part of its general de-stuff-ifying of its Penguin Classics line of canonical reprints, certain of the "deluxe" titles in Penguin's catalog have received pretty unconventional covers illustrated by alterna-comics artists. In addition to this lovely version of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle with flensed cow head by…