Omni Daily News

By Tom

The Girl with Nothing but a Laptop: Girl with the Dragon Tattoo author Stieg Larsson, who has become a fiction phenomenon after his death (1 in 3 Swedes have read his books, and USers like him too), died without a will, so between his girlfriend of 30 years, who helped research his books, and his father and brother, whom he had cut ties with long ago, guess who ends up with his money and intellectual property and his half of their apartment? His family has offered to trade the girlfriend Larsson's share of the apartment for the laptop he left behind, which may contain a sequel to his three bestsellers and notes for more. Stay classy, Larssons!

The Ascent of Woman: Ruth Padel, the great-great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin (whose life she put into verse for his 200th birthday in this year's well-reviewedDarwin: A Life in Poems), was named the first Oxford professor of poetry in the 300 years since the plum position was created. (And is she also the long-lost boho sister of Liz Taylor? The Guardian photo might lead you to think so...)

The Sun Never Sets: The Commonwealth Writers' Prize, whose geographical eligibility is so conveniently explained in its title, announced its overall winners for 2009: Best Book to Australia's Christos Tsiolkas for The Slap (not yet available on any Amazon site, although you can preorder the Canadian edition, coming in February), and Best First Book to Pakistan's Mohammed Hanif for A Case of Exploding Mangoes (a favorite of ours too).

Very Old Bones: Little, Brown and some publicity-savvy paleontologists are making a multimedia rollout of a new scientific discovery, named Ida:

Lying inside a high-security vault, deep within the heart of one of the
world's leading natural history museums, is the scientific find of a
lifetime "“ a perfectly fossilized early primate, older than the
previously most famous primate fossil, Lucy, by an astonishing
forty-four million years.

There will be a Discovery Channel special on Memorial Day, and a new book by Colin Tudge: The Link: Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor. [Via Publishers Lunch and GalleyCat]

--Tom