This is the eighth in an occasional series of updates about our nearly 200 Significant Objects authors. We’re publishing these while we work on various Significant Objects-related projects about which you’ll hear more soon. In the meantime, read SO v1 stories | SO v2 stories | SO v3 stories, and follow our Twitter stream.

1) On the occasion of the publication of Ben Greenman’s What He’s Poised to Do (June 2010) Harper Perennial’s Letters With Character project invites you to write a letter to a fictional character. Tell Alice (the one in Wonderland) why her choices were bad. Tell Holden Caulfield why he’s important to you, or too self-important. Write about beloved books, obscure books, whatever, so long as you’re writing to someone fake and you’re real.

2) Bruce Holland Rogers is living in Budapest and teaching at Eötvös Loránd University on a Fulbright grant. He continues to write stories for subscribers to shortshortshort.com. He says: “Most recent stories have featured Hungarian characters for some reason.”

3) Nick Asbury has recently written a 50-word poem as part of a project with International PEN, marking 50 years of their Writers in Prison committee. The poem addresses the plight of imprisoned Swedish-Eritrean journalist Dawit Isaak.

4) Tom Vanderbilt’s book Survival City: Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic America, was recently released in paperback by the University of Chicago Press. He is wrapping up work with his collaborative study of New York City’s garment district for the Design Trust for Public Space and, rather appropriately, has just taken up new office resident in a former garment factory on the banks of the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn.

5) Girls Write Now interviewed Lizzie Skurnick at Chapters 4/23. Check out the video.