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.

Step aside, Pantone. These proposed paint chips—based on literary references—offer hues like Gulag (in honor of Solzhenitsyn), Havisham’s Complexion (Great Expectations), Esther’s Sauce (Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar), and Snot (Ian McEwan, The Cement Garden).

For its new Twitter-based gameshow “Questioningly,” the New Yorker asked readers which English word should be eliminated from the language. “Fecund”? “Phlegm”? “Tebowing”? Nope. By an overwhelming vote, the most despised word is … “moist.”

The 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, announced Monday, goes to Brooklyn’s Tracy K. Smith for Life on Mars. Published by Minneapolis’ Graywolf Press, it’s decribed as a “collection of bold, skillful poems” that moves readers “to an authentic mix of joy and pain.”