Have you ever known a guy who shotgunned so hard trying to get shredded that he developed bitch tits? How many cups of coffee did the lot lizard's john get with the help of blue steel? When a griefer frags your avatar at the spawn point, do you spam him with taunts? Did you leave a sitzmark on crud after the gaper blocked your way?

These quasi-English sentences may be Greek to you. But each makes sense to the members of a certain subculture: bodybuilders, prostitutes, online gamers and skiers, respectively, in the examples above.

One of the screens in Burlington's Roxy Theater frames an image as carefully composed as a painting. A woman and two young men recline side by side on a worn Persian rug, their eyes closed. The woman's robe is pulled back to expose her breast, but the scene is not overtly erotic. The actors don't speak. Two unseen women narrate in voiceover. In French, translated by subtitles, they speak of the unendurable heat of Calcutta, where the film takes place; of the smells and sounds of the streets; of the characters' longing for a cleansing storm.

Writers, has someone's reaction to your work ever made you want to sink into the ground? If so, you're in good company.

Grace Paley used to submit stories to magazines "again and again, and they always came back." New England novelist Ernest Hebert remembers John Gardner returning his manuscript at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference with one comment: "No real writer would write a sentence like that.

Given its focus on all things verbal, it's appropriate that the second annual Burlington Book Festival opened with a politician confused by a pun. Last Friday evening, in the newly opened Presentation Hall in the Lake & College building, Mayor Bob Kiss welcomed about 30 attendees to the weekend of author readings and other literary events. "'Three days of authorized activity,'" Kiss said, quoting the festival's promotional tagline.

We tend to make certain assumptions about political poetry: that it's doctrinaire, one-sided, humorless. Maybe it's the result of hearing too much doggerel read at rallies. However, that's not how it has to be. In his famous Defence of Poetry, 19th-century radical poet Percy Bysshe Shelley claimed that good verse is always political, though not necessarily partisan, because it encourages us to feel empathy for strangers.

On July 3, some local writers and readers checked their inboxes and found a piece of sad news. "I'm writing to inform you that The Write Place is going to be discontinued as a program of Burlington City Arts," wrote Susan Weiss, coordinator of the nearly 3-year-old program housed at Burlington's Firehouse Center for the Visual Arts.

The Write Place was Weiss' brainchild when she started at BCA as a volunteer.

Thanks to the antics of Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie playing spoiled rich girls shoveling manure in the boonies, the phrase "the simple life" is hard to utter with a straight face. Calais writer Ruth Porter's novel The Simple Life intends the title ironically. But it's still an antidote to the televised heiresses and all they represent.

In the novel's opening chapter, Jeff and Isabel Rawlings, a Massachusetts couple up for their 25th Green Mountain College reunion, get stuck in spring mud on a remote country road.

"Book groupies are like bird watchers. We collect author sightings for a life list," said Caroline DeMaio, Danville School librarian and former owner of Northern Lights Bookshop. She was speaking at the Vermont Library Association's Celebration of Vermont Authors and Illustrators on May 16. One of DeMaio's fondest memories from her bookselling days is a "sighting in the store of Toni Morrison, confirmed by her Mastercard.

During World War II, an impulsive, artistic young woman named Lily Sergueiew fled occupied France to live near friends in England. From there she began sending regular radio transmissions to the Nazis. In May 1944, Sergueiew informed her German spymaster that she was romantically involved with an American officer. Through him, she claimed to have learned all sorts of specifics about the First U.S.

It's 2109. Humanity has colonized the moon and Mars, but all is not well in space, or on Earth, for that matter. War rages between the Universal Islamic Nation and a Western Christian, capitalist alliance known as the Universal Trade Zone. It all started with the destruction of Jerusalem in 2041, and "after Mecca was destroyed in 2070 there was no turning back." The Muslims' latest target is the Vatican, seat of a new unified church that calls itself "catholic" with a small C and rivals the Catholic Church of the Renaissance for intrigues and skullduggery.