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

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