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This site about places in time--intended as a "collaborative, immediate, rich" venue for historical scholarship about places in the Philadelphia area--just turned up on Serendip...something for us to watch...

Also, still chewing on Zadie Smith possibilities, I note both this interview with her in The New Yorker (July 23, 2012), which is illuminating both re: her process and her style. She speaks of deciding to let herself "be led by whatever appeared in front of me as I was writing it," just thinking of the book "as a collection of found items." She talks about trying to make "a fragmentary third person work" (because "single-voiced monologues" bore her), of showcasing "fundamentally significant" "varietals of voice and lifestyle." Also striking to me is her observation that both her main characters, Keisha and Leah, "tend to feel that their real life occurred between the ages of about twelve and eighteen." Perhaps a draw for our students, perhaps not...?

See also the short story, Permission to Enter, which Smith discusses in the interview--published @ the same time, it's an excerpt from the end of NW. So we could do these things instead of the novel, if that just seems too ponderous (though don't get me wrong: I'm drawn to big baggy books like this one!)