This is why the potential is always there for me to get nothing done. Here are some of the top links that caught my eye from today's Arts & Letters Daily and Marginal Revolution sites. I could have spent a happy hour reading all of them, but I decided to confine them to my Readability queue instead. I may actually get around to reading these items in the next few months. We'll see if they're as interesting  to me then as they are today.

• Literary self-publishing. An indie band that releases its own CD or album gets street cred. Not so for those who publish outside the mainstream press.
• New books on fairy tales. What makes these archetypes so durable? Why do books on a theme come in threes?
• "The fantastic pervades the world’s literatures of every time and place; our much vaunted realism is the sport, the mutant." Gore Vidal often derided the grey American naturalistic prose style of the '50s (his early novels were written in that style).
• Simon Schama on the writers who inspired him.
• Gladwell on Jerry Sandusky and how child molesters get away with it.