Ideas are like cats, said Ray Bradbury: “They come silently in the hour of trying to wake up and remember my name … and if I don’t rouse, give more than cats give: a good knock in the head, which gets me out and down to my typewriter before the ideas flee or die.”

Ray Bradbury, known for writing in genres from sci fi and horror to the dystopian novel, has passed away at age 91. His classics include Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine, The Martian Chronicles, and Something Wicked This Way Comes, among others.

“The covers are dead!” writes Craig Mod in his essay about the history of the book cover. Based on the shift in where we buy and browse for our books (online and on e-readers), Mod suggests there is much possibility in reinterpreting covers for digital formats.

From OWS’ People’s Library to Little Free Libraries, we’re seeing a guerrilla library boom. Shannon Mattern asks “where they’re coming from, how they relate to existing institutions that perform similar roles, and what impact they’re having on their communities.”

It’s a job you’re unlikely to hear about at Career Day, so read along as Dalal Al-Mutairi, Kuwait’s senior censor, discusses her work. “Many people consider the censor to be a fanatic and uneducated person, but this isn’t true. We are the most literate people.”

The dense prose of Thomas Pynchon, born today in 1937, would hardly seem the stuff of a mass movement, but that’s what Pynchon in Public Day aims for: A global surge of “unashamed” public readings of Pynchon and works by “heirs” like Eggers and Foster Wallace.

Caldecott-winning children’s book author Maurice Sendak has died from complications of a stroke at age 83. Best known for Where the Wild Things Are (1963), Sendak’s unorthodox tales include Bumble-Ardy, released last fall, about a pig whose parents got eaten.