“Sometimes an actor performs a character, but sometimes an actor just performs. With writing, I don’t think it’s performing a character, really, if the character you’re performing is yourself. I don’t see that as playing a role. It’s just appearing in public.” The full transcript of Sheila Heti’s interview with Joan Didion is now online.

If the blog network Tumblr were a city, it would have 42 million residents. And cities, of course, need newspapers. To accommodate their growing population, Tumblr is creating a “news site for the things that happen in the Tumblrverse,” and has already hired two media vets to edit it.

A former Harper’s Bazaar intern has filed suit against the magazine for allegedly forcing her to work forty to fifty-five hours a week without pay. “The case poses philosophic and economic challenges not just for the publishing industry but for an overall economy in which more and more businesses are using interns,” writes PaidContent’s Jeff Roberts. In other news, the Associated Press has reinstated its internship program after a yearlong hiatus.

Never mind the literary luminaries: Stephen King, Erica Jong, and Tom Clancy populate David Foster Wallace’s list of his top ten favorite writers.

“As if we need you! Who cares if you come or not? Would Turkey lose any grandeur?” Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in response to Paul Auster’s announcement that he will not visit Turkey to protest the country’s recent persecution of journalists.

Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet Wislawa Syzmborska died on Wednesday at home in Krakow. The eighty-eight year old published her first book of poems in 1952, and her most recent collection, Home, was released in the U.S. in 2008. “I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems,” Syzmborska once told an interviewer.

According to the New York Daily News, GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich has written dozens of Amazon user reviews over the past eight years—enough to earn a “Top Reviewer” rating. And what do the reviews teach us about his tastes? “For one, he really hates the Clintons,” the Daily News says. “He loves a good mystery. He's fascinated with World War II, as well as the Civil War, with a special appreciation for the ‘automatic aggressiveness’ of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.”

German author Bernard Schlink is taking the Weinstein Company to court for not paying him royalties from the film adaptation of his novel, The Reader. Schlink, it is worth noting, has been a judge and a professor of law.

In other magazines: Triple Canopy has released a new Occupy Wall Street issue. Also, new issues of Open Letters Monthly and Words Without Borders are now up online.

We’re looking forward to the new New Inquiry. The magazine relaunching its website (it’ll go live on February 6), and for $2 a month, subscribers will receive a “e-reader-compatible PDF on the first Monday of every month.” And though we can’t tell if it’s meant to be tongue-in-cheek, the theme of their next issue is precarity.

“Blurbs, like bullshit, existed long before the term coined to describe them,” Alan Levinovitz writes in a brief history of the book blurb, which traces its origin back to at least 1516.

Barnes & Noble has refused to stock titles from Amazon’s publishing imprint. According to a statement from B&N, the move "is based on Amazon’s continued push for exclusivity with publishers, agents and the authors they represent," which the bookstore claims prevents them from “offering certain e-books to our customers.” However, Barnes & Noble’s website will continue to sell books published by Amazon.

The Center for the Art of Translation has posted a video of a Lydia Davis lecture on her translation of Madame Bovary, where she explains how she used Nabokov’s marginalia from one of his copies of the book (found at the New York Public Library): “He was quite helpful, but then I trusted him too much. And I found that he wasn't really always right, so I had to back off a little bit from my utter trust.” However, Nabokov was certainly right about at least one thing: Flies walk, they do not crawl. (The audio of the entire Davis’s talk is available here.)

The New York Times profiles FSG publisher and poet Jonathan Galassi, and interviews him about his forthcoming poetry collection, Left Handed.

The Occupy Wall Street Library and Occupy Tuscon are teaming up to flood the Tucson Unified Public School District with books that were banned last year under an ordinance prohibiting school curricula “designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group.” The Occupy Wall Street library’s press release says: “Acting in solidarity with OccupyTucson and the students, parents, and teachers of the Tucson Unified School District we are going send copies of the banned texts to Tucson for distribution. Lots of copies. As many copies as we can find and buy.”

The upcoming March election in Russia was, until recently, deemed a sure victory for Vladimir Putin, John Lloyd writes in a multi-book review for the Financial Times. He enjoys strong popular support, stronger KGB ties, and is a “master of nostalgia, with a fine ability to render the Soviet period as one in which, granted, mistakes were made but greatness was achieved.” These days, though Putin is still the likely winner, his political future isn’t quite so clear. “Even among allies,” Lloyd writes, “the mix of policies, attitudes and enmities that has sustained the Putin regime is losing its potency."

Today in shameful procrastination memes: “shit agents and editors say.”

"Jonathan Franzen: e-books are damaging society."

At the Paris Review Daily, Avi Steinberg considers the relationship between libraries and pornography, and how the library, “once a hothouse of Eros and a laboratory of realism, has become a burial site.”

Open City author Teju Cole has been appointed the distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Bard College.

NYRB Classic’s blog has posted “Good Morning, Giantess!,” the first story from Robert Walser’s new collection, Berlin Stories.

Investigative journalism organization ProPublica presents its new (and very timely) Tumblr: “Officials Say the Darndest Things.”

What’s the difference between literary and genre fiction? (Aside from success on the New York Times bestseller list?) A literary agent explains.

In Madrid, an art exhibition about French avant-garde writer Raymond Roussel, “Locus Solus,” includes work by Joseph Cornell, Salvador Dali, and Cristina Iglesias, but, sadly, not Roussel’s “land yacht.”

Tonight at 192 Books, Adam Johnson reads from his new book, The Orphan Master’s Son, which Wyatt Mason praises in this week’s New Yorker. Mason writes, Johnson does “a superb job of conjuring the almost surreal physical particularities of the country, its cities that go dark at nightfall, as the nation’s generators go silent until dawn.”

In a rambling essay published in Russia Free Newspaper, Russian President Vladimir Putin offers a solution for edifying “the dominance of Russian culture” once and for all: an official literary canon. “Let us take a survey of our most influential cultural figures," suggests Putin, "and |Each self-respecting student was required to read 100 books from a specially compiled list of the greatest books of the Western world.|compile a 100-book canon| that every Russian school leaver will be required to read."

What will happen when physical Barnes & Noble bookstores and their hard-copy products vanish in favor of e-books, and the chain becomes “little more than a cafe and a digital connection point?”

London’s City University now offers the world’s first master’s degree in crime writing.

For readers who have trouble keeping up with the news (or just following stories in detail), the New York Times gives you Deep Dive, a vaguely Orwellian “context engine” that uses a reading history and the Times archive to provide “readers a collection of stories relating to a topic, based on whatever person, place, event or topic of their choosing.”

Where did closeted Hollywood A-listers go for sex in the '40s? According to a forthcoming memoir by former marine and male madam Scotty Bowers, they went to him. In Full Service, Bowers breaks nearly three decades of silence to talk about setting up liaisons for the likes of Cary Grant, George Cukor, and Rock Hudson during Hollywood’s golden age.

The good news: The Chicago Tribune is getting a new stand-alone, 24-page book review section, and a free sample will be available on Sunday. The bad news: It will cost Tribune subscribers an additional $99 a year to get the review, which is being marketed as "premium content."

Do book bloggers matter? Reed Exhibitions thinks so—they’ve just bought the two year-old Book Blogger Convention as a supplement to BookExpo America (BEA).

Children’s author Maurice Sendak had some very adult things to say about e-books during his loopy appearance on the Colbert Report.

Until he began to work for Amazon’s publishing arm, Larry Kirshbaum was a successful literary agent and a big-time industry insider, a BusinessWeek cover story on Amazon’s foray into book publishing reports. Since defecting to the digital world six months ago, Kirshbaum has signed big-name writers like Timothy Ferriss, pop polymath James Franco, and basketball coach Bob Knight with big advances—all the while becoming the scapegoat for the decline of print publishing.

Not safe for work! At Vice, Giancarlo DiTrapano, who edits the New York Tyrant, talks dirty with Edmund White.

Andrew Miller has won Britain’s prestigious Costa Prize for his sixth novel, Pure.

Washington, D.C., has been named the country’s most literary city (New York doesn’t even make the top ten). You go, Pittsburgh, PA (#6)!

William S. Burroughs, in a 1959 letter to his mom and dad: “It strikes me as regrettable that one should reserve a special and often lifeless style for letter to parents.” Burroughs’s selected letters will be published in February.

Last week, novelist Hari Kunzru was advised to leave the Jaipur Literature Festival after he read excerpts of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, which remains banned in India. (Rushdie, also present, received death threats.) On Twitter, Kunzru argues that he did nothing wrong: “More Indian legal experts confirm that we broke no law by reading from The Satanic Verses."

Everyone’s talking about Newt Gingrich’s personal life and political record, but what about his books? In addition to a series of novels about WWII, Gingrich wrote a revisionist take on the Civil War—in which the South wins. Since the politician hasn’t been flaunting his literary chops on the campaign trail, one Twitter fan is doing it for him. Since Jan. 23, @gingrichfiction has been tweeting some of Newt’s best lines. Most of these must be fake, but with Newt, it’s hard to say.

Tonight at Manhattan’s 192 Books, n+1 is celebrating the release of their new issue, “Machine Politics,” including essays on the Occupy movement, Elizabeth Gumport’s essay about Chris Kraus, and excerpts from Benjamin Kunkel’s new play. And don’t worry, if you meet somebody at the party and forget to get their number, there are always the n+1 personals.

Laura Kipnis analyzes Michel Houellebecq’s self-parody.

In 1933, F. Scott Fitzgerald penned a letter to his eleven-year-old daughter offering her some fatherly advice about (a) what to worry about and (b) what not to worry about. In the first column: courage, cleanliness, efficiency, and horsemanship. In the second: mosquitoes, parents, boys, and popular opinion.

Justin Stanley, the founder of Uprise Books, explains how his nonprofit group gets kids to read by promoting banned books: “The same teen who would never think to read The Great Gatsby because it was named the best book of the 20th century might be turned on to the book that was challenged for its 'language and sexual references.'"

Which books inspire the most tattoos? (But wait, don’t forget Thomas Pynchon, Emily Dickinson, and Shakespeare.)

Jonathan Safran Foer has joined the likes of Sam Lipsyte and George Pelecanos. That’s right, he’s writing for HBO. His new show will star Ben Stiller.

After putting out her debut, a plague novel titled Last Last Chance with FSG, Fiona Maazel has sold her second novel to Graywolf Press. Described as a “sweeping commentary on loneliness in America,” Maazel’s new book, Woke Up Lonely, features “a cult leader, his ex-wife, and the four people he accidentally takes hostage.” It’s scheduled to come out in Spring 2013. In the meantime, you can read her review of Ben Marcus’s The Flame Alphabet in our winter issue.

To the confusion of the publishers and people who have declared print is on its last legs, recent figures reveal that e-book sales are growing “incrementally,” not “exponentially.” While industry insiders had hoped that sales would increase by 25 percent in 2011, they only jumped 17 percent. Still, it’s an improvement from the year before, which only saw 9 percent of book buyers opting to purchase e-books.

Knopf publicity director Paul Bogaards is a funny man. In addition to his lively Twitter account (sample tweet: “Authors tweet because they covet the followers of other authors”), Bogaards has created a hilarious compendium of publishing-related posts on Tumblr. In 2011, according to a Bogaardian pie chart, this was mostly “Amazon, death of publishing,” “mind-numbing meetings,” “Steig Larssen blah blah blah,” and “drinking.” To usher in the New Year, Bogaards has put out a Top 100 Hierarchy of Book Publishing, which opens with “Brand-name authors (still),” moves through “Laura Miller when she is cranky” to “Laura Miller when she is not cranky,” and ends with “you.” Enjoy.

Graphic novel publishers Drawn and Quarterly have acquired the rights to vintage Pippi Longstocking comics, and will start releasing translations of the books this fall. The stories, written by Astrid Lindgren and drawn by Ingrid Vang Nyman, originally ran in Sweden’s Humpty Dumpty magazine between 1957 and 1959.

Today’s eBay find: Moby Dick typed out on six rolls of toilet paper, with bids starting at $400. “Considering what it’s been through,” the seller writes, “it’s in amazing condition.”