Linda Lovelace and James Fenimore Cooper, together at last: Welcome to Harvard’s wacky New Literary History of America, arriving in bookstores as we speak (and more and more and more). Li'l Lionel Trillings will have to fend for themselves: Columbia English professor James Shapiro’s undergraduate seminar, “The Book Review” is on indefinite hiatus. Why are wonderful writers sometimes such dull conversationalists? The Daily Beast is forming a new imprint that will focus on publishing books on a much shorter schedule. This is your brain on Kafka: Does absurdist literature make you smarter? Penguin’s Great Ideas series is too Eurocentric, too male, but at least it’s made it cool to pull a volume of Edmund Burke from your pocket. What does your bookcase say about you? Prune that prose: Learning to write for readers beyond academe. Publishers be bold: Why it's time to ditch the subtitle. On the occasion of its 35th anniversary, Linda Wolfe provides a brief concise history of the National Book Critics Circle (and more on NBCC's 35th anniversary). A new wave of posthumous releases from authors like Vladimir Nabokov, David Foster Wallace and Ralph Ellison raises thorny questions about what the writers intended. The sincerest form of lawsuit bait: Sequels are a constant lure for authors who didn’t write the original. Curling up with hybrid books, videos included: Publishers are looking to “vooks,” which intersperse videos in electronic text that can be read and viewed online. A review of The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession by Allison Hoover (and more).