This is an actual thing happening at an actual college. Ohio State University is teaching sparkly tween paranormal romance Twilight as part of an honors literature course. Taken from the actual course’s syllabus, which can be downloaded here:

While we read and discuss some important, influential narratives about the supernatural – Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight as well a few minor works – we will also explore how these texts, like much other fiction, try to create particular reading experiences, as they push us to consider the nature and importance of literary imagination and the way fiction’s seductiveness is tied to other potentially dangerous attractions.

For good measure, here’s how a fairly esteemed college feels about Twilight.

(epicponyz via The Daily What)

Today, a specialist will open up four vaults in Zurich, believed to contain the unexamined last words of the late writer Franz Kafka, the BBC reports. The enigmatic Prague-born author, who penned the widely-read short story The Metamorphosis, had a good chunk of his texts–many of them unfinished–published posthumously.

At some point in the past 50 years, Kafka’s last documents were stored in bank vaults in Tel Aviv and Zurich. Now the writings, which have been the subject of a long legal battle regarding owner rights, will finally be examined.

McSweeney‘s Lists are only my second favorite thing about McSweeney’s, just after their “Open Letters to People Or Entities Who Are Unlikely To Respond.” A little while ago, Mike Lacher‘s List Great Literature Retitled to Boost Website Traffic debuted.

It’s sort of like… what if Cracked.com wrote the Western Canon?

Sherlock Holmes is a strange literary phenomenon; inspiring one of the very first examples of what today we would consider fandom. If you have not read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle‘s Sherlock Holmes, there are two things you must know about the Great Detective that are usually (not always, but usually) ignored when he is repackaged for a mainstream audience.

• He was addicted to cocaine.
• He faked his own death and disappeared for three years.

If this sounds good to you, Neatorama has a handy guide (an excerpt from Ransom Riggs’ The Sherlock Holmes Handbook: The Methods and Mysteries of the World’s Greatest Detective) to faking your death the Sherlock Holmes way, even going as far as to suggest some improvements on his method.

Soon, students at Cambridge University will be getting a new supplement to their educations: books from Stephanie Meyer‘s Twilight series.

According to BBC News, a newly-opened Cambridge center for the study of children’s literature (they call it a “centre,” naturally) will cover, among other things, Twilight, the Harry Potter series, and video games as works of literature.

In an interview, the soon-to-be director of the center/centre dismissed suggestions that Twilight and other contemporary series are “trash,” and even said that academics had something to learn about ethics from the series:

4chan.org (never, ever, ever work-safe) — commonly known as “the primordial soup from which Internet memes emerge,” “that place that all of those Scientology protesters come from,” and “the worst site on the Internet,” has added six new message boards, including ones dedicated to advice, 3D modeling, and…literature?

Moot, creator of 4chan and unwilling Kerensky to the site’s roiling, extremist proletariat, announced the new boards in typically derisive fashion: