Alexander Star, formerly an editor at Lingua Franca and the New York Times Magazine, is leaving his current position at the New York Times Book Review to become a senior editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

The Awl recounts how in the late 1950s Saul Bellow helped his closest friend get a teaching job—without realizing this so-called friend was sleeping with his wife.

Canada’s National Post is taking a fast and dirty approach to e-books, publishing as many (and as many different kinds) as possible to see what sells.

Timothy McSweeney—after whom Dave Eggers named his notorious literary magazine and publishing company—was not a whimsical invention but a real person. As Eggers tells the Sacramento Bee, the late McSweeney was an artist who was institutionalized for mental illness. “From there, he mailed odd letters to strangers who shared his last name, believing they were relatives.” One of the recipients was Eggers's mother, whose maiden name was McSweeney.

An Internet archivist who has preserved more than 150 billion webpages now wants to do the same for print. Each week, upwards of twenty thousand books arrive at a warehouse in Redmond, California, to be saved for the ages. “We want to collect one copy of every book,” owner Brewster Kahle tells the New York Times. “You can never tell what is going to paint the portrait of a culture.”

Tonight in Brooklyn, n+1 has invited sociologist Eric Klinenberg and writers Kate Bolick and Daniel Smith to discuss Going Solo, Klinenberg’s new book about “the extraordinary rise and surprising appeal of living alone.”

We really enjoyed this meditation on the metaphor.

Jesse Ball’s The Curfew, Helen DeWitt’s Lightning Rods, Lars Iyer’s Spurious, Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, and Michelle Latiolai’s Widow make up the shortlist of the Believer’s book award. The winner will be announced in the May issue.

“Reader, I ...”

Why does Wall Street appear so rarely in fiction? John Lanchester claims it’s because explaining the intricacies of high finance would bog down good storytelling. Explanation, he says, is “fine in small doses, as a dollop of rationale before the main course of drama, but anything longer and the reader wakes hours later to the familiar clanking noise of the milkman delivering bottles to the front door.”

Salman Rushdie will chair this year’s PEN World Voices Festival, and participants will include Martin Amis, Colson Whitehead, and Marjane Satrapi. We were thrilled to see that Elevator Repair Service, the Downtown theater group who brought us the brilliant staging of The Great Gatsby, will be performing.

The eighteen-room, Greek revival home in Brooklyn where Truman Capote wrote Breakfast at Tiffany’s just sold for $12 million—$6 million below the initial asking price.

Marilyn Monroe may be dead, but that didn’t stop The Believer’s Sheila Heti from interviewing her.

At the AWP convention in Chicago last weekend, we saw great events (Eileen Myles and Monica Youn) and lots of new books (finished copies of Edouard Leve’s Autoportrait), but nothing surprised us quite as much as seeing—and touching—Edward Gorey’s fur coat, which the writer notoriously wore to the New York Ballet (with Converse). The writer A. N. Devers, who now owns the coat, would even let you try it on.

The American Scholar explains how F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up anticipated the rise of autobiographical essay writing in America.

In case you missed it, Slate’s monthly book review launched last weekend, and it’s pretty awesome.

A review of Andrew Breitbart's Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World!.

Before his death last December, Christopher Hitchens was known for torching his intellectual adversaries. Vanity Fair interpreted this talent rather literally when they handed out Christopher Hitchens lighters at their Oscar party last weekend. Each quote came engraved with a Hitch quote, including our favorite: “Everyone has a book inside them, which is exactly where I think it should, in most cases, remain.”

Slate launches the inaugural issue of the Slate Book Review today, a monthly review that will publish on the first Saturday of every month.

To protest a bill passed last year in the Tucson, Arizona, public school system that bans school curriculum “designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group,” a group calling themselves Librotraficante have organized a book caravan to smuggle “contraband” books back into affected schools.

Bookstores are suffering, and so are libraries. But curiously, bookstores in libraries are on the rise.

McSweeney’s imagines the titles of rejected AWP panels, including “How to Explain to Your Parents That Your Novel is Not Based On Them”; “I Love Your Use of Narrative Exposition: Dating Writers 101,” and “So You’re the Person Who Rejected My Story: Proper Editor Etiquette.”

The musical adaptation of Roald Dahl’s children’s book Matilda has been a runaway success in London, and this week, The Royal Shakespeare Company announced plans to bring the production to Broadway.

In response to the latest VIDA report, Emily Gould posits, at The Awl, an interesting theory about the paucity of women writing or getting reviewed in any of the “top” literary magazines. “Could it be,” she wonders, “that part of the imbalance is caused by the fact that women are choosing not to write for these magazines?”

We just listened to two recent and excellent public-radio interviews, both available online: At L.A.’s Bookworm, host Michael Silverblatt talked with Wayne Koestenbaum about his book Humiliation (which Laura Kipnis wrote about here). And NPR’s Tom Gjelten interviews Timothy Snyder about Thinking the Twentieth Century, his collaboration with Tony Judt, the world-class public intellectual who died of ALS last year. Near the end, Snyder says, Judt lost all the use of his limbs, but “he retained a potent individuality.”

Yesterday, the AWP (which stands for Association of Writers & Writing Programs, so it should be AWWP, but never mind) kicked off its sold-out annual conference at the Chicago Hilton. In addition to bringing in luminaries such as Forrest Gander, Jennifer Egan, Margaret Atwood, and others, the conference promises to drastically increase alcohol sales in the area. Last night’s best off-site event was at the Empty Bottle, where James Greer—who used to write rock journalism, then played bass for Guided by Voices, and now is a novelist and screenwriter—played with his band Detective.

Comedy Central has announced its plans to start publishing books. And no, that is not a joke. The network plans to inaugurate its imprint, Running Press, later this year with a novelty holiday book by Denis Leary. (Though we wonder if the press’s name will stick, as another Running Press already exists.)

The London Review of Books has published a lost short story by Charlotte Bronte that turned up while a contributor was researching the writer at a museum in Charleroi. The story, “L'Ingratitude,” was written in 1842 in French and handed in as a homework assignment for Bronte’s tutor.

VIDA has released their 2011 count of male-to-female ratios in literary magazines. A quick scroll down the page reveals the usual predominance of red: The color denoting the number of male authors who wrote for, or are reviewed by, publications like The Atlantic, Harper’s, and the TLS. Only two of the publications surveyed were not in the red: the Boston Review (9 women reviewed, 5 men), and Granta (34 women, 30 men; thanks in large part to their summer issue dedicated to feminism). Why does this sound so familiar? Oh, yeah. This year, the disheartening charts are adorned with quotes from editors like David Remnick, exhorting the industry to do better next time, and barbs of wisdom from authors such as Roxanne Gay: “Many people want to understand why this disparity exists instead of addressing the disparity itself. I’m not going to do that anymore. There is a problem. I’m comfortable with that making me a bitch who be trippin’. There is work to be done—let’s get to it.”

After debuting at #87,199, Peter Kiernan’s nuanced study, Becoming China’s Bitch, has topped Amazon’s bestseller list. It’s also currently holding the top spot on Barnes and Noble’s bestseller list, and though it was released only yesterday, is already scheduled for a second print run.

Edouard Levé’s Suicide, Mathias Énard’s Zone, and Juan José Saer’s Scars are three of the many excellent books on the list for the University of Rochester’s annual Best Translated Book Award, which was released today. The winner will be announced at the upcoming PEN World Voices Festival (which takes places in New York from April 30 to May 6), and will net its author and translator $5,000 each.

Rapper CeeLo Green has struck a deal with Grand Central Publishing to publish a memoir next year. “After reading my book, there will be no doubt that I am meant to be,” CeeLo explained in his press release. “You will enter into the supernatural, the surreal, and extraordinary. As CeeLo Green, a.k.a. ‘everybody’s brother,’ I will make you a believer.”

A new issue of n+1 film supplement N1FR is out, featuring Damion Searls on Margin Call, Christine Smallwood on Apichatpong “Joe” Weerasethakul (and on Herzognian caves), among other good things. To boot, the editor’s note begins with an apology: “This second edition of the N1FR, n+1’s film review, is very late,” writes A.S. Hamrah. “Its lateness has nothing to do with n+1 or with any of the contributors, or with our generous sponsor IFC Films. It’s entirely my fault.”

Minnesota-based Graywolf Press and literary magazine A Public Space are embarking on a new collaborative publishing effort. According to a Monday press release, “Graywolf plans to publish two A Public Space books per year, with ‘A Public Space Book’ printed on the back cover and in the interior.” The titles will be chosen and edited by A Public Space founder Brigid Hughes, who will announce the first book in the series within the next few months.

After his “messy breakup” with (or “semi-retirement” from) Poynter, Jim Romenesko, the news-aggregating pioneer and media watchdog with nearly 47,000 Twitter followers, is back, flagging an egregious ESPN headline (“Chink in the Armor”—about basketball player Jeremy Lin) and tracking down a statue of Confederacy of Dunces protagonist Ignatius J. Reilly.

Thanks to the recent success of two record-breaking projects, Kickstarter says it will give out over $150 million in fundraising this year—just over the $146 million that the National Endowment for the Arts will distribute in 2012. Does this mean that Kickstarter now offers more arts funding than the NEA?

A good old-fashioned literary feud is brewing in the South: Oxford American founder and editor Marc Smirnoff takes to the pages of his magazine to rail against competitor Garden & Gun, “the fancy ‘lifestyle’/Southern-culture magazine out of Charleston, South Carolina.” Smirnoff explains that when he started OA in the late ’80s, the only “Southern” magazines around “flaunted a South that seemed cordoned off for the private use and pleasure of wealthy white people.” His problem with Garden & Gun (“GAG to its foes; G&G to its partisans”) is “that I perceive in it a similar exclusivity—a similar whitewashing of the South.”

Algonquin Books hopes to release legendary publisher Barney Rosset’s unfinished autobiography, tentatively titled The Subject Was Left-Handed, by the end of the year.

Vladimir Nabokov’s son Dmitri Nabokov died in Vevey, Switzerland, last Wednesday at the age of seventy-seven. According to the Times, Dmitri was “a bon vivant, a professional opera singer, a race car driver and a mountain climber.” But he was best known as the executor of his father’s estate. After Vladimir’s death, Dmitri oversaw the publication of the novelist’s letters, stories, and unfinished novel.

The Washington Post closed its standalone book review, and the Los Angeles Times cut book coverage. But as the National Book Critics Circle’s Jane Ciabattari tells Publishers Weekly, it's not all bad: Book sections at the San Francisco Chronicle, Cleveland Plain-Dealer, and Chicago Tribune show no signs of slowing down.

Have trouble remembering the books that you’ve read? Publishers Weekly offers tips on “How to Cure Reading Forgetfulness.”

Inspired by Wallace Stevens, Jeff Gordiner takes a literary pilgrimage to Hartford, Connecticut, which, thanks to the poet, he claims, “could probably rival the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco as a wellspring of psychedelic imagery.”

A kind of Spotify for books has launched in Spain. For ten euros a month, Booquo subscribers get all the e-books they can read—as long as they’re put out by the right publishers.

Amazon has pulled more than four thousand e-books from its digitial shelves after publishers refused to let the company sell them more cheaply.

J.K. Rowling is breaking into the world of adult fiction. The Harry Potter author announced this week that after a five-year break, she's signed a deal with Little, Brown to publish her next book, which will be targeted for an older audience. The book's title and pub date have not been released.

Writer Will Self has been named a Professor of Contemporary Thought at London's Brunel University. Self will be teaching in the arts and social sciences departments, and plans to introduce himself to the university with lecture on "urban pyschosis" at the end of next month.

Can’t sell your book? Patricia O’Brien—sorry, Kate Alcott—suggests changing your name.

In anticipation of AWP, Tin House provides a field guide to the literary types that will be floating around Chicago next week: While memoirists “favor fleece outerwear and often carry snacks,” “the essayist signals his difference from the memoirist by the appropriation of a blazer.”

While held captive in Berlin during the Second World War, P. G. Wodehouse recorded radio broadcasts for the Nazis. When the war ended, it was these broadcasts (one of which featured the author describing the German army as “a fine body of men, rather prettily dressed in green, carrying machine guns”) that prevented his return to England, out of fear that he would be persecuted on charges of treason. For the next twenty years, Wodehouse allies petitioned the British government to let him return. These documents, though ultimately unsuccessful—“He was nothing more than a silly ass!” wrote one unnamed friend—are now declassified and available to be read at the UK National Archives.

A self-published webcomic is behind the most successful creative Kickstarter campaign ever, having raised more than a million dollars over a nine-year fundraiser. The Order of the Stick author and illustrator Rich Burlew began the campaign in 2003 with the hopes of raising the $57,750 needed to keep his comics about the “fantasy adventures of a collection of stick figures in a role-playing game world,” in print. He succeeded: The campaign closed on Tuesday with 14,952 backers and $1,254,120.

Ernest Hemingway’s childhood home in Oak Park, Illinois, is for sale for $525,000, while the gated home that was built for Thomas Mann in Brentwood, California is rentable for $15,500 a month.

Legendary publisher Barney Rosset passed away yesterday at the age of ninety. From the helm of Grove Press, Rosset was one of the first to publish Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg, David Mamet and Malcolm X, among others, and spent years in court defending his books from charges of obscenity. (This was the the subject of a 2011 documentary about Rosset, Obscene). He also published the literary magazine The Evergreen Review, which still exists online. Here's a Paris Review interview with Rosset, and a 2008 profile of him by Louisa Thomas.

Why was Kanye West thanked in Patrick French’s 2008 biography of V. S. Naipaul? Paul Wachter investigates.

Deborah Eisenberg and Wallace Shawn will read from Gregor von Rezzori’s An Ermine in Czernopol at the Center for Fiction tonight. If you haven’t already, read Marjorie Perloff’s essay on Rezzori in the most recent issue of Bookforum, and here’s a 1988 BOMB interview with the man himself.

After leaving the Village Voice last month, longtime film critic and Bookforum contributor J. Hoberman has found a new gig, joining Blouin Artinfo as the site’s chief film critic.

Abraham Lincoln has been commemorated on coinage, through statues, and in literature. But until recently, never before have the last two been combined. In honor of President’s Day, a group of historians constructed a thirty-four-foot tour of books about Lincoln, which they set-up in the lobby of a center affiliated with Ford's Theatre. According to Ford’s director Paul Tetreault, over 15,000 books have been written about Lincoln—more than anybody in history except Jesus.

A correspondent for Science explains how his “dance your phD” party became a successful online video competition.