At The Daily Show, Jon Stewart talks with J.K. Rowling about her first novel for adults, The Casual Vacancy, released in September, and her years of financial struggle prior to writing the Harry Potter series; Rowling is now 47 years old.   CBS’s 60 Minutes profiled Rodriguez, a Detroit-based musician and subject of the recent documentary Searching for Sugar Man. Rodriguez recorded music in the 70s, then gave up his music career, until the late 1990s, when he discovered that he had a huge fan base in South Africa, which led to a major revival of his career, when he was in his late 50s. The BBC shortlisted “Before He Left the Family,” a story by Australian writer Carrie Tiffany (whose acclaimed, award-winning first novel Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living was published when she was 40) for its International Short Story Award.  At Bookdragon, Terry Hong raves about Requiem, the latest novel by Frances Itani, who published 10 works of poetry and fiction with very-small presses until 1998, when Harper Collins published her story collection Leaning, Leaning Over Water, which was followed by Deafening, her first novel, published in 2003 when she was 61.  At Toulouse Street, Mark Folse puts out a call for nominations to assemble “a list of regional writers who began publishing after 40, or published their first book-length work after 40 if published before,” concurrently (and coincidentally) with the launching of Bloom.   The New York Times reviews Andrew McCarthy‘s memoir, The Longest Way Home, McCarthy’s first book-length work after several years working as a travel journalist (McCarthy turned 50 this year — yesterday, in fact).  And novelist Erin McGraw, who was interviewed here two weeks ago about Donald Ray Pollock as a student, was the featured author at One-Story earlier this month.

And, we’re excited to note that Bloom’s launch was highlighted and featured around the Webs last week: at the New Yorker‘s Page-Turner blog, at the LA Times’s Jacket Copy, at The Atlantic, and at Flavorwire, among others.