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The already slim chance that anyone might still be alive aboard the South Korean ferry that sunk a week ago was all but extinguished Wednesday with the news that divers have found no air pockets in key areas of the ship.

That word came as the number of bodies recovered from the Sewol edged above 150. As of mid-afternoon Wednesday in South Korea, "152 people had been confirmed dead while 150 others remained missing," Yonhap News reports. The water where the ship went down just off the southern coast of South Korea is said to be about 160 feet deep.

More than 320 of the estimated 476 people who were on board when the ferry capsized and sank were students from a high school in Ansan, near Seoul, who were traveling to a resort island. Most of the 300 or so people who likely died were teenagers. Officials have said that 174 people were rescued before the ferry flipped over.

According to CNN:

"Divers have found no air pockets on the third and fourth floors of the sunken ferry Sewol, South Korean authorities said Wednesday. ... Searchers had been focusing on the third and fourth levels of the five-floor vessel, as they believed many of those still missing were likely to be there. Most passenger bedrooms are on the fourth level of the now upended ship."

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

Gabriel Garca Mrquez left behind an unpublished manuscript when he died last week at age 87, Cristobal Pera, editorial director of Penguin Random House Mexico, told The Associated Press. Pera added that Marquez's family has not yet decided whether to publish it. Meanwhile, the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia published an extract of the work, tentatively titled We'll See Each Other in August (En agosto nos vemos). In the excerpt, a middle-aged woman named Ana Magdalena Bach has a fling during her annual trip to a tropical island to put flowers on her mother's grave. She stays at a hotel overlooking a lagoon full of herons. Ana, though she's married, meets a man at the hotel and begins an affair with him. The excerpt has a strong sense of place — Garca Mrquez's descriptions are lush with flowers and tropical life – and a ripple of eroticism travels through it, from the touch of perfume Ana puts behind her ear at the beginning of the chapter to the thunderstorm during her encounter with the man from the hotel.

David Foster Wallace's estate and his former publisher have come out in opposition to the making of the forthcoming film The End of the Tour, which is based on Wallace's conversations with journalist David Lipsky. In a press release, the David Foster Wallace Literary Trust wrote, "This motion picture is loosely based on transcripts from an interview David consented to eighteen years ago for a magazine article about the publication of his novel, 'Infinite Jest.' That article was never published and David would never have agreed that those saved transcripts could later be repurposed as the basis of a movie." It added that "there is no circumstance under which the David Foster Wallace Literary Trust would have consented to the adaptation of this interview into a motion picture, and we do not consider it an homage." Wallace committed suicide in 2008.

The Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the most prestigious literary award in the Spanish-speaking world, will be awarded to Mexican author Elena Poniatowska on Wednesday in Spain. Previously won by Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz and Gabriel Garca Mrquez among others, the prize is worth 125,000 euros (about $173,000).

A previously unpublished story by Shirley Jackson, the writer best known for her story "The Lottery," is printed in The New Yorker. "The Man in the Woods" is a short, sinister story about a man named Christopher who walks through dark woods to find an isolated house surrounded by trees, "the forest only barely held back by the stone wall, edging as close to it as possible, pushing, as Christopher had felt since the day before, crowding up and embracing the little stone house in horrid possession."

Comedian Megan Amram has a book deal for Science...For Her!, which she calls "a fun, flirty, Cosmopolitan-like textbook that is tailored to you, ladies." On her website, Amram describes the book as "a science textbook written by a lady (me) for other ladies (you, the Spice Girls, etc.)," and adds that "it has been demonstrated repeatedly throughout history: female brains aren't biologically constructed to understand scientific concepts, and tiny female hands aren't constructed to turn most textbooks' large, extra-heavy covers." Amram's book may be a parody, but it's not that all that far from reality: A 2013 book titled Girls Get Curves: Geometry Takes Shape combines math tips with advice on "how to attract guys," and uses handbag shapes to explain quadrilaterals.

"You have no legs and your name is alliterative." "A coachman treats you saucily." "You are either ruddy, stout, or flint-eyed." The Toast has some tips for telling whether you are in a Charles Dickens novel. (Full disclosure, I've written previously for The Toast.)

The sponsor of a bill to make the Holy Bible the official book of Louisiana has withdrawn the measure ahead of a full vote in the state House of Representatives, saying the proposal has become a distraction.

As we reported last week, a mix of Republicans and Democrats had moved the largely symbolic bill, sponsored by Rep. Thomas Carmody of Shreveport, out of committee on an 8-5 vote.

The measure had been scheduled for a floor vote on Monday, but Carmody said he told the constituent who asked for the bill that he "was going to go ahead and return the bill to the calendar [on Monday] and concentrate our efforts on those things that are much more important."

The Times-Picayune reports:

"In introducing the legislation, Carmody always maintained he was not taking steps to establish a state religion, but rather to educate people. Critics have accused him of foisting faith inappropriately into the government sphere. Others thought such a designation would trivialize the Bible and its importance.

"Initially, Carmody had just been intending to designate a specific, historic copy of the Bible, which he thought could be found in the Louisiana State Museum, as the official state book. But lawmakers amended Carmody's legislation two weeks ago to propose making any copy of the 'Holy Bible' the official state book."

In a high-rise office in Rosslyn, Va., Adam Parkhomenko is selling campaign paraphernalia for a campaign that may or may not happen.

"Bumper stickers, magnets, and then we have everything from T-shirts, we have baby onesies that we're almost out of now," says Parkhomenko.

Parkhomenko runs a group called Ready for Hillary. It's more than a Clinton fan club: It's a superPAC, a list-building superPAC.

The next presidential election is more than two years away. Nevertheless, an unprecedented amount of infrastructure is under construction for a Hillary Clinton campaign that is still a matter of speculation.

"Ready for Hillary is focused on the grass-roots piece of organizing, and making sure that all throughout the country, if she does this, that there's an army of grass-roots supporters behind her from Day 1 that are ready to go," Parkhomenko says.

This kind of bottom-up grass-roots organizing was not a strong suit for Clinton's 2008 campaign. But the shadow campaign developing in advance of a possible 2016 sequel is focusing on the ground level. Ready for Hillary raises small donations by selling baby onesies and holding small-dollar fundraisers.

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