Welcome to this week’s further reading / listening / watching round-up. Enjoy!

• On the Guardian website, John Caird’s Top 10 Survival Tips for any aspiring theatre directors

– John Caird will be taking part in a National Theatre Platform with actor Simon Russell Beale on Friday 9th April at 6pm

• Frances Stonor Saunders’ account of Violet Gibson – aka The Woman Who Shot Mussolini – as heard recently on BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week

• Rachel Polonsky’s skatulochka – that’s Russian for ‘jewellery box’ according to the Daily Telegraph – Molotov’s Magic Lantern on Radio 4’s Open Book

• In April we publish Emily Woof’s debut novel, The Whole Wide Beauty. Ahead of publication she wrote this feature for the Guardian’s Family section

• Lucy Worsley, Chief Curator of the Historic Royal Palaces, whose new book Courtiers is published in May, is named as one of the 50 Women to Watch in the Arts

• Alex Preston, author of This Bleeding City, interviewed by Mariella Frostrup on Open Book

• Hanif Kureishi’s Collected Stories appeared in March. Here’s Hanif reflecting on middle age on Radio 4’s Today Programme

• ‘You’ll struggle to find a more readable exegesis of Homer’s epic’ wrote the Sunday Times about Caroline Alexander’s The War that Killed Achilles. Here’s Caroline discussing the book, again on Start the Week

And finally …

• Spotted last Sunday evening (March 21st) on the BBC’s fine series, Seven Ages of Britain, was a 5-minute long segment [20 mins in] devoted to Mass Observation, the social research organisation from the 1930s onwards which set out to record the daily lives of ordinary people. David Dimbleby clutched in his hand and read from a copy of The Pub and the People, one of 12 M.O. books now available in Faber Finds. [Here they all are].

A round-up of just some of the recent coverage online for Faber books and authors, and anything else that catches the Thought Fox’s eye …

• Who will win the T. S. Eliot Prize?
  The Sunday Times speculates on the outcome – Faber interest lies in Alice Oswald and Hugo Williams, as well as our former Poetry Editor (and Costa winner) Christopher Reid and a number of poets we’ve published in the past.

• ‘A geographical form of insanity.’
  Brooklyn’s finest, Jonathan Lethem, takes the Observer’s Gaby Wood on a tour of the neighbourhood – a very different past and present. His new novel, Chronic City, takes place over the river in Manhattan, but they’re all New Yorkers …

• ‘Lethem is one of the greatest living writers we have.’
  More Jonathan Lethem – this review in The Scotsman is one of many impressive reactions to his new novel Chronic City.

• ‘Unrequited love makes fools of many of us.’
  This week Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk told a packed Southbank audience that his new novel The Museum of Innocence (translated by Maureen Freely) was not a book about obsession – so what’s the reason for building a museum to house your beloved’s intimate and disposable possessions? Mirroring the novel, a real museum opens this year.

• Orhan Pamuk on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week.
  Available to Listen Again.

• The Ticking is the Bomb.
  Nick Flynn follows up his 2005 memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (soon to be a film starring Robert De Niro and Casey Affleck) with a meditation on his impending fatherhood, against a background of painful personal memories and the darkness of humanity.

• ‘The Rootless Cosmopolitan.’
  An early review in the New Yorker of Michael Scammell’s huge biography of Arthur Koestler, which we publish in February.

If you’re an editor, you scan the Books of the Year round-ups not just for the books you’ve published or Christmas present ideas, but also for books you turned down. If there is a book in the round-ups or bestseller lists that you rejected, you hope none of your colleagues will remember your long, passionate explanation in the editorial meeting of why no one would ever want to read about Cromwell, Pacific Northwest vampires, reluctant fundamentalists or Harvard symbologists …

Then there are those books which never landed on your submission pile and so you can envy and admire them from afar, guilt and anxiety free. The books below are of this variety – some of the non-Faber books I wish I’d published this year – call it a retrospective wish list.

Direct Red

The non-fiction book I most wish I’d published is Gabriel Weston’s Direct Red. Weston is a young British surgeon and this – a memoir of becoming and being a surgeon – is her first book. For me the book immediately places her alongside Atul Gawande and Oliver Sacks, my favourite medical writers. She explores every aspect of being a surgeon, from making mistakes to fancying a patient to the complicated sexual and hierarchical politics of hospitals, in beautiful, spare, shockingly honest prose.

Dewey the Cat

My mother is a cat-loving librarian. So I have to include another memoir, Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World, on my list. It’s the true story of a cat who was abandoned in the library drop-box in a poor Iowa town, rescued by the librarian, named Dewey (as in decimal) and eventually became the town mascot. Everyone in the town rallied around Dewey and the library, and they all became cat-loving, library-card-toting, altogether better people: my mother’s dream come true.

American Wife

I’m cheating a bit with this next choice: Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife was supposed to be published this year but was rushed out at the end of 2008 to coincide with the American election. The novel is a fictional account of the life of Laura Bush (another librarian) but Sittenfeld is such a breathtaking writer that I’m convinced it’s all completely true. Sittenfeld is wonderful on those moments in life when you know you should be feeling one way but your emotions run off in an unexpected direction.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

The most fun I’ve had all year has been reading the first two Stieg Larsson novels, and so I wish I’d published his third, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, even though I haven’t read it yet (I’m saving it for Christmas).

Too Much Happiness

Finally, who wouldn’t want to have published the inevitably amazing new story collection from Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness?