Critic and historian Paul Fussell, author of the the award-winning WWI study The Great War and Modern Memory, has died, the New York Times reports.

The trailer for Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby is online, and we have very mixed feelings about it. But if you’re into the idea of a Leonardo DiCaprio-starring, Kanye West-soundtracked take on Fitzgerald—which is also shot in 3-D—this is probably for you. In other adaptation news, New York reports that James Bobin will direct The Confederacy of Dunces, and that Zach Galifianakis will star as Reilly.

Although Richard Brody disagreed with many of Susan Sontag’s opinions on film—particularly vis-a-vis her opinions on Godard and resistance to interpretation—reading her journals has made him realize what was behind her thoughts on movies, and how central they were to her identity.

The London Review of Books has published “The University Poem,” a previously unseen work by Vladimir Nabokov about his time at Cambridge University. The work will be included in Nabokov’s collected poems, which are coming out in the UK in July.

To promote the re-release of seven of Truman Capote’s novels, Vintage has published a handful of Capote’s more famous works—including Breakfast at Tiffany’s—as e-books, marking the author’s breakthrough into digital print.

Hemingway scholar Michael Reynolds has shed light on who the “lady poets” were in Ernest Hemingway’s snarky short piece, “The Lady Poets With Foot Notes.” The “college nymphomaniac” was identified as Edna St. Vincent Millay; the “favourite of State University male virgins” was Sara Teasdale; and Amy Lowell was apparently “big and fat and no fool.”

Tao Lin is “no longer trying” on Twitter, and HTML Giant is tracking his progress.

More than ten million copies of Fifty Shades of Gray have been sold in the U.S. since it went on sale six weeks ago.

One reason why it’s so difficult to predict literary longevity is because of the “high-school popularity problem,” Tom Vanderbilt theorizes, noting that the qualities that make people popular in high school (or the literary world) like being the “radiant prom king, adorned with varsity letters” don’t translate into long-lasting success. So what does make an author last? Getting your book adapted into film, writing at least one best-seller, and becoming central to an intellectual movement.

We’re having a little too much fun procrastinating with grammar-nerd game “I Shot the Serif.”

Triple Canopy runs an excerpt of Ariana Reines’s translation of Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl.

After seventeen years, mobile services company Orange has announced that it will withdraw funding for its annual women’s fiction prize, ending the UK’s longest continuous arts sponsorship. The prize is designed to “celebrate excellence, originality and accessibility in women's writing from around the world,” and grants winners £30,000 “and a bronze figurine known as ‘the Bessie’.” Award founder Kate Mosse says that the prize is currently on the hunt for a new sponsor.

Though word of mouth suggests that fewer publishers will be at Book Expo America this year, this announcement might draw them back: on June 6—the second day of the three-day conference—Patti Smith will be interviewing Neil Young on stage. Young’s memoir, Waging Heavy Peace, will come out in October with Blue Rider Press.

And speaking of Patti Smith, here’s a Spitify playlist of all the songs mentioned in her memoir, Just Girls.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has officially filed for bankruptcy in order to restructure 3.1 billion in debt. But HMH has plenty of plans for the future: For one, it will publish Amazon's new imprint under the New Harvest title.

Tonight at the New School, Eric Banks joins Charles Petersen, Joan Wallach Scott, David Nasaw, Mark Alan Hewitt, and others to discuss the controversial “Central Library Plan” and the future of the New York Public Library.

Thanks to a new initiative by Esquire, “men’s fiction” may be the next obnoxious category seen in bookstores—or at least on e-readers. The magazine is launching a new series of “Fiction for Men” e-books, which will begin with short stories by Aaron Gwyn, Luis Alberto Urrea, and Jess Walter, and coincide with the publication of new fiction by Stephen King and Colum McCann in the summer issue of the magazine. Meanwhile, “men’s fiction” has already become a running joke on Twitter, with Elif Batuman, Jennifer Weiner, and plenty of others weighing in on the label.

“A promising debut...” Translation: “This author already signed a two-book deal.” At Ploughshares, Andrew Ladd deciphers ten adjectives overused by book reviewers.

In honor of the launch of The New Yorker’s new literary blog Page Turner, the magazine features the best of their literary cartoons from over the years.

Exorcist author William Peter Blatty (Georgetown, class of 1950) is taking his alma mater to Catholic court for moving too far away from Church doctrine. Blatty, who is a devout Catholic, says the “last straw” came when the university invited Health and Human Services Secretary Katherine Sebelius to speak. Sebelius has come under fire from conservative Catholics for backing a measure that requires religious organizations to pay for employees’ birth control.

The Toronto Star has republished Ernest Hemingway’s reporting for that paper, along with annotations from his editor and a number of Hemingway scholars. The articles are divided into seven Hemingway-eseque categories, including “Sport,” “Vice,” “At Home,” and “War.”

When HHhH translator Sam Taylor moved to France eleven years ago, he spoke no French, but decided to learn it and become a literary translator in order to supplement his income as a novelist.

Newly minted New Republic owner Chris Hughes has lured former editor Franklin Foer back to edit the magazine. Foer ran the magazine for five years until leaving in 2010. In an interview on Thursday, Hughes told the New York Times that he plans to double the size of the editorial staff (there are currently fifteen employees) and open an office in New York. “I want everyone from Michael Bloomberg to Zadie Smith to Sheryl Sandberg to read The New Republic,” Hughes remarked.

Electric Literature rolls out its “Critical Hit” awards for May’s best book reviews.

New York Times editor Trish Hall revealed some “secrets” about the Grey Lady at a recent talk, including how much the paper generally pays writers for Op-Ed pieces: $150.

John Steinbeck’s son talks about what it was like to receive advice (sometimes in letters as long as eighteen pages long) from his occasionally brilliant, occasionally very absent-minded father.

A previously unpublished essay by William Gass has been released as an iPad only e-book, paired with abstract photos by Michael Eastman. Abstractions Arrive is a 15,000-word about modern art and photography.

Neil Gaiman's advice for freelancers.

Robert Draper, a contributor to the New York Times Magazine and GQ, has has been added to John Edwards’s witness list. Draper responded on Twitter: “To Edwards defense team: not sure why I'm on your witness list, but I'm in Libya all month anyway, carry on.”

Writer Kyle MacDonald, best known for using the barter section of Craigslist to trade his way up from a red paperclip to a house in Saskatchewan, is making headlines again, this time on Etsy. For 5.67, MacDonald is selling a “de-written” edition of the book Be Excellent at Anything: The Four Keys To Transforming the Way We Work and Live, by Tony Schwartz, Jean Gomes & Catherine McCarthy. (This basically means a copy of the book with a lot of text hidden by scribbles or literally cut out with a scissors. The new title: Be Anything.) According to MacDonald’s Etsy description, it took “5 black felt pens and 100 hours” to create the “more than 352 unique drawings” in his version of the book.

In 1947, Malcolm Cowley told an interviewer that "a man does what he has to do—if he has to write, why then, he writes; and if he doesn't feel the urgent need of writing, there are dozens of professions in which it is easier to earn a more comfortable living." The remark, which was recently quoted in a Paris Review Daily essay on Cowley, inspired a fiery response from Helen DeWitt, who took to the comments section to offer a less romantic take on writing: “The writer who is literally an addict, the writer who can’t help himself, the writer who HAS to write, can never be anything but an amateur, because the industry requires the professional to put writing on hold not just for a day or two, or a week, but for years.”

The New York Times’s Janet Maslin is not a fan of the new Obama exposé by Edward Klein, the former editor of the NYT Magazine. "The Amateur by Edward Klein," Maslin writes, "is a book about an inept, arrogant ideologue who maintains an absurdly high opinion of his own talents even as he blatantly fails to achieve his goals. Oh, and President Obama is in this book too."

What’s the relationship between writing, romantic love, and solitude? Emily Cooke considers the question in a new essay on Susan Sontag, Vivian Gornick, and Alejandra Pizarnik for the New Inquiry.

St. Andrews University in Scotland hosts Britain’s first academic conference on Harry Potter.

“Mommy porn” novel Fifty Shades of Gray was a Mother’s Day hit, selling 443,000 copies—a 40 percent increase—the week before the holiday. If you haven’t read it yet, you might be able to pick up a copy at a bodega near you.

That over-opinionated friend, too much white wine, requesting to read Middlemarch.... Here’s a list of the best ways to kill your book club.

Robert Caro has started a Twitter account. “To be clear,” he writes, “this account will almost certainly never be put to use. It has been reserved, however, ‘just in case.’"

Critic Michael Dirda gets candid with Reddit users in an “Ask Me Anything” interview. Among his responses: while he appreciates self-publishing, Dirda thinks that “if you’ve written something that people actually want to read” it will be published by a reputable house. He then goes on to name the worst book he’s ever read as “Judith Krantz’s Dazzle. Even the sex in the book was boilerplate, a totally meretricious work.”

After publicly complaining about how “there aren’t enough great novels in one year to make a top 10 list,” Lev Grossman admits that “even though it’s only May, I’ve already read enough novels I love to fill up most of my list for 2012.” Edward St. Aubyn’s At Last, Elizabeth Hand’s Available Dark, Mark Leyner’s The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, Hari Kunzru’s Gods without Men, and Laurent Binet’s HHhH all get mentions, but it’s Hillary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies that’s the excuse for the article.

A new study from Harvard Business School finds that Amazon reviews are as likely to reflect a book’s critical reception as professional newspapers. Study authors looked at a hundred non-fiction reviews from forty outlets—including the New York Times, Washington Post, and The Guardian—for their survey, and compared them against Amazon buyer reviews. Overall, they found that although Amazon reviews are far from foolproof, “experts and consumers agreed in aggregate about the quality of a book.”

Chinua Achebe’s memoir about Nigeria’s 1967-1970 Biafra War is in the works with Penguin Press. There’s no publication date set yet, but the book is tentatively titled There Was A Country.

From Brooklyn Heights to Cornelia Street to St. Mark’s Place—W.H. Auden’s many residences around New York City.

How a book is born—one disheartening (but hilarious) infographic.

Prolific Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes died at a hospital in Mexico City on Tuesday at the age of eighty-three. One of the most influential members of the Latin American Boom movement, Fuentes was the author of over thirty books, including The Death of Artemio Cruz, The Old Gringo, and The Crystal Frontier, as well as a political columnist and essayist. Though he was never granted a Nobel Prize, France did give him a National Order of Merit, the highest award available to civilians, in 1997, and in 1994 Spain gave him a Prince of Asturias Award for literature.

Despite a Twitter hoax claiming the contrary, Gabriel Garcia Marquez is still alive.

A new study suggests that contemporary writers are paying less attention to their predecessors than they are to their peers. Looking at 7,733 books, essays, and poems that were written after the year 1550, Dartmouth mathematicians found that certain stylistic tics were good indicators of what writers were reading. Their takeaway was that “while authors in the 18th and 19th centuries are still influenced by previous centuries, authors writing in the late 20th century are instead 'strongly influenced' by writers from their own decade.”

Journalist and literary prankster Mike McGrady died this week at the age of seventy-eight. McGrady was best known for publishing the 1969 “suburban sexcapade” Naked Came the Stranger under the pseudonym Penelope Ashe, though the book was actually written by two dozen Newsday reporters. "It was great," McGrady told the Los Angeles Times after the scheme had been revealed. "Everybody sat down and wrote his chapter in one night. It was terrific for morale at the paper. We would all pass our chapters around to see how bad everybody else was writing. The only problem was that we had to send several back for rewriting. They were too good." The following year, McGrady published his second book, this time under his real name. It was titled Stranger Than Naked: Or, How to Write Dirty Books for Fun and Profit.

New York didn’t even crack the top twenty of the country’s best-read cities this year, according to the second annual Amazon ranking. The list was based on total Amazon sales of books, magazines, newspapers, and e-books in cities of more than 100,000 people. While Berkeley, California, and Cambridge, Massachussets, nabbed the second and third spots, Alexandria, Virginia was named the country’s most literary city—as well as the biggest market for romance novels.

The New Yorker has relaunched its literary blog with a new name and logo: Page-Turner. According to its mission statement, the blog is dedicated to “criticism, contention, and conversation about the most important books of the moment.”

Last night the New York Public Library hotsted its ceremony for the Young Lions Award. After Sloane Crosley and Billy Crudup read excerpts by the five finalists, the top honor was presented to Swampladia! author Karen Russell (she is in Berlin, so her brother accepted in her place). Swamplandia was also one of the finalists for this year's much-dicussed Pulitzer Prize.

How did the new owner of the Harvard Book Store figure out a way to compete with Amazon and “solve consumer’s expectations for instant gratification and delivery”? Answer: He installed an Espresso Book Machine, so that when books aren’t available in the store, they can be printed and bound, on the spot, for customers.

John Cheever would be turning 100 on May 27. To celebrate, Random House is releasing an updated edition of Cheever’s iconic red doorstop, Stories of John Cheever. For an introduction to the book, here’s T.C. Boyle on his own experience reading it, and what it was like to take Cheever’s class at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

How do publishers commission current events books? An editor at Yale University Press explains.

How much of David Sedaris’s monologues are real and how many are “realish”? The Mike Daisey scandal has NPR wondering—and wondering if the question matters when it comes to humor writers.

In just about two weeks the Getty Research Institute will launch a new online art historical database with access to over twenty thousand titles. It will be open to anybody—not just professional academics or art historians.

Jeanette Winterson will return to her hometown to take up a new gig as a professor of creative writing at Manchester University. The position, which involves teaching undergrads and grad students, has previously been held by Martin Amis and Colm Tóibín.

Hari Kunzru peruses Richard Prince’s book collection.

Is getting profiled in the New Yorker the kiss of death for a director or actor’s career? “To put it mildly, there’s something of a New Yorker feature curse going around Hollywood these days,” Salon’s Alec Nevala-Lee writes, “since the beginning of 2010, the magazine has published eight features on artists best known for their work in film. Two are profiles of Clint Eastwood and Jane Fonda that are basically career retrospectives. Of the remaining six, five of their subjects... experienced significant professional reversals soon after the articles appeared.”

The Awl copyedits the last three issues of Copyeditors magazine, and catches ten typos.

Jonathan Lethem talks with NPR about the Talking Heads album “Fear of Music,” which is the topic of his new essay-length book.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has accepted $500 million in financing from Citigroup Global Markets to help the publisher restructure roughly $3.1 billion in debt. According to the Wall Street Journal, HMH has been hit by state budget cuts for K-12 textbooks, which make of the majority of company profits. Those sales have fallen by nearly fifty percent over the past four years.

The managing editor of the Missouri Review literary journal discusses how he got into his line of work, and considers the notion that “no one ever grows up wanting to be an editor.”

Arts journal Her Royal Majesty has reprinted Alice Munro’s first published story, “Dimensions of a Shadow,” after discovering it in the University of Western Ontario’s college literary magazine Folio. The story isn’t available online, but the first few paragraphs are at the Paris Review Daily.

Caleb Crain considers the evolution of modern slang: “Like poetry and pornography, slang is easier to recognize than to define.”

Today in seventy-year-old scandals: The Guardian has revealed Federico Garcia Lorca’s erstwhile lover to be art critic Juan Ramirez de Lucas. Lorca wrote “passionate verse” to the young critic before the poet was killed in the Spanish Civil War, but his lover’s identity was not revealed until now. In 2010, the critic gave his sister a box of of their correspondence shortly before his death.

John Updike’s childhood home in Shillington, Pennsylvania, which he lived in until he was thirteen, is going to become a museum. The John Updike Society paid $200,000 for the property, which they hope will become “a destination for writers and scholars.”

Manohla Dargis reviews director Cristian Jimenez’s adaptation of Bonsai, a film based on Alejandro Zambra’s novella.

Norton has put together a list of all their editors who use Twitter.

Here’s an audio recording of John Ashbery reading at the 92Y Poetry Center, just before he turned 25.