Dibs

She left Oakland, California — which is undergoing a plague of homicides this summer — but violent crime followed her. Decomposed, face beaten beyond recognition, the body of 21-year-old Boitumelo “Tumi” McCallum — who attended Oakland’s Mills College last year — was found on August 5 wrapped in a sheet between a wall and a bloody, condom-wrapper- and bottle-strewn bed in a Manhattan apartment owned by her mother, NYU professor and anti-apartheid activist Teboho Moja, author of National Policy and Regional Response in South African Higher Education. McCallum’s possessive, angry boyfriend, Michael Cordero, has confessed to killing her. At a Myspace page last updated in 2006, South African-born McCallum calls herself a bisexual Michael Jackson fan whose favorite book is The God of Small Things. “I laugh really loud and obnoxiously — all the time,” she wrote.

In other sad book-related news, the celebrated and very prolific Burmese novelist Tayar Min Wai, who wrote under the names Shwe Phone Lu and Maung Yaw, died Saturday of liver disease in Rangoon, aged only 41, according to the Irrawaddy News. He had written 42 books since 1995, the year he was released from prison after serving four years for taking part in the 1988 pro-democracy uprising that gave hope to many young Burmese — but did not bear fruit.