Get to know the real John Cheever. (Left, with John Updike)

• Google goes steampunk for the birthday of Jules Verne.

• Emily St. John Mandel discusses bad reviews.

• A dead rabbi writes a letter to a literary critic from beyond the grave.

• Eugene Mirman does a pretty good Bill O’Reilly impersonation considering he looks and sounds nothing like him.

• James Dean would have been 80 today.