The Penguin Group has filed suit against writers Elizabeth Wurtzel, Ana Marie Cox, Rebecca Mead, "Hip-Hop Minister" Conrad Tillard, and Holocaust survivor Herman Rosenblat to recoup tens of thousands of dollars (up to $81,000, in one case) spent on book advances (and interest) for manuscripts that were never turned in.
n+1 has posted an impressive remembrance of Shulamith Firestone, the author of The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, with testimonies from Kate Millet, Chris Kraus, Nina Power, and others.
Could book bloggers be hurting literature? Peter Stothard, a Booker Prize judge, says that "if the mass of unargued opinion chokes off literary critics, ... then literature will be the lesser for it."
Singer and legendary gentleman Morrissey was spotted at the Strand bookstore in NYC last week, aiding a woman who fainted in the claustrophobic confines of the Strand’s stacks. After Morrissey helped the woman to her feet and collected her dropped belongings, he politely offered to get her some water. We imagine he’s getting in the habit of courting potential readers: His 600-plus page autobiography is due out from Penguin UK this winter.
The New York Review of Books blog runs a moving essay by Charles Kaiser about being gay and working as a journalist in the seventies, and how after years of homophobia, The New York Times finally came out of the closet.
Frequent Bookforum contributor Heather Havrilesky is dispensing wise advice under the pseudonym Polly Esther at The Awl. First up: What to do when you stop liking your friends.
Inspired by Tina Fey’s memoir Bossypants, Neil Patrick Harris has announced that he’s just sold a book of “imaginative nonfiction” to Random House imprint Crown. Harris says that to save time, he’s going to take Fey’s book, and "reprint those exact stories but change the names to people that I knew."
