George Eliot’s writing desk has been stolen from the Nuneaton Museum and Art Gallery in Warwickshire. (It’s a lap desk, so that was easier than it sounds.) A local councillor calls the theft “a low blow.”

“This event, mixing an author and an apartment, is just one of many such gatherings that have taken place at buildings across Manhattan in recent months.” Come for the reading, stay for the pricey real estate! Take heart from the fact that books are … bait?

Look on his works, and tremble: all Tom Wolfe’s books, arrayed.

In case you were wondering, Helen Vendler is reading John Ashbery and D. A. Powell. Among others. No novels, though! “If you like the precision and concision of poetry a page of prose is unsatisfying in a certain way.”

“We liked the the double meaning of weather and communication,” says Jay Schwartz of Dictionary.com, which has named blusterits word of 2012.