BEA can blur past faster than a Kindle page-turn, leaving the bookish with the uneasy feeling that they've missed something, but now they can map the three day publishing maelstrom in advance with My BEA Show Planner.

"We" would like to "inform" you that scare quotes are "frightening," just "say" what you "mean." Greil Marcus, who recently co-edited the exhaustive A New Literary History of America, found scare quotes—"a narrative disease"—scattered throughout the more than two-hundred essays in the collection, and sees them as "a matter of a writer protecting himself or herself." When Marcus asked contributors if he could rid their texts of the protective punctuation marks, "they said, over and over, yes. It was as if we were disarming them of a weapon they had aimed at themselves."

Surely, there is a middle ground between paper and plastic: while plastic-based reading is advancing in these Silicon Valley-driven times, Stanford University may be a bit too early with its plans for a bookless library. Reference books are able to mix apps and digital content with quirky print titles. Even as rare book dealers become rarer, there are calls for those "who love books as beautiful objects of cultural history" to embrace digital publishing, because if you can't beat 'em, plug in.

The New York Review of Books weighs in on the iPad Revolution, explaining how readers get hooked: "one day, you find yourself housebound, and Wolf Hall has just won the Booker Prize, and you download a sample onto your iPhone, and just like with a book printed on paper you are pulled into the story and are grateful to be able to keep reading, and your resistance disappears."

Is the fierce hacker of the Steig Larsson trilogy a grown-up Lolita? As readers of Nabokov's classic know, Lolita (a.k.a. Mrs. Dolly Schiller) died in childbirth after she was freed from Humbert Humbert's lecherous hands, but if she hadn't, it is hard to imagine her fighting back as viciously as Lisbeth Salander. Thomas Matlack finds that Salander's revenge on her male tormentors may be what makes the Larsson trilogy so intriguing—it isn't the clock-work plots or flat-footed writing—and that Lisbeth's liberation "frees us all of the sexual exploitation that has come to plague not only the news headlines but our very lives." We imagine Nabokov chuckling at Lolita being drafted in service of Matlock's earnest argument, and we think he’d shudder at the comparison of Salander with his beloved Lo, as he once said, "There are some varieties of fiction that I never touch—mystery stories, for instance, which I abhor."

Bookforum's new summer issue maps utopia, and though the word means "no place" in Greek, that absurdity hasn't inhibited a great many dreamers and schemers: History is littered with attempts to realize some portion of heaven on earth, and literature is rife with depictions of worlds gone right and worlds gone very wrong. 

When he died in 1979, J. G. Farrell was hailed as his generation's greatest historical novelist. Thirty years later, the view still holds, at least among the judges of the "lost" Booker award, who granted the prize to Troubles, his wicked 1970 satire of Anglo-Irish relations set during the Irish War of Independence. Matthew Price, writing in Bookforum's fall 2005 issue, found Troubles to be "madcap and blackly comic, shot through with piercing evocations of the Irish landscape."

"If you want to know who might be running for president from the GOP side just check your local bookstore and see who has new books on the shelf," writes Robert Guttman, director of the Center on Politics and Foreign Relations, listing the recent and future publications from the leading lights of the Grand Old Party. The Democrats have an incumbent running in 2012, but that doesn't mean they're not in on the act; Obama book deals are booming, with nine more volumes in the works. Not all political memoirs are meant for the campaign trail; every first lady since Lady Bird Johnson (except Pat Nixon, who was, of course, a special case), has written one, including Laura Bush's new Spoken form the Heart, a "pleasantly soporific" read for sleepless nights. 

Bookselling behemoth Barnes & Noble is re-examining its business model as well as entering the self-publishing business with the summer launch of PubIt!, which will allow independent publishers and self-publishing writers to distribute their works digitally.

Stephen Fry, best known for playing the part of Wodehouse's Jeeves, who is now the "king of Twitter," will judge the Guardian Hay festival's Twitter competition for "the most beautiful tweet'" ever written, but he better watch out for the scarlet letters "RT," because retweeting might prove to be plagiarism.

The new City Lights catalog cover seems to be saying "Smash your Kindle," according to eBookNewser, but in a long letter in response, publisher Elaine Katzenberger says they've got it all wrong.

Rock, paper, Twitter: Christopher R. Weingarten plans to be the Last Rock Critic Standing, but it sure isn't easy. Weingarten tweeted more than one thousand reviews last year, wrote for the Village Voice and rollingstone.com, produced a book, and often contributes to online music message boards, though he thinks the Internet is diluting serious music and criticism: "We all wanted to democratize art. And now that we did, nobody’s making money off of art, and art’s not as good.”

Robert Walser found the sound of pencil on paper to be soothing, and scratched out stories in a minuscule script on scraps of paper, the backs of envelopes, and calendar pages. He said that using a pencil freed him from what he called "pen malaise." City Lights has collected twenty-five of Walser's mini-masterpieces, which took scholars decades to decipher, and reproduced the original manuscripts along with translations of the large-hearted stories within. Tomorrow evening at 177 Livingston, Triple Canopy is hosting a reading of Walser's Microscripts by translator Susan Bernofsky and writer Rivka Galchen.

Touchy typing: Author Skye Ferrante was ejected from the Writer’s Room in Greenwich Village he's been a member of for six years for the transgression of using a typewriter. Apparently, the bang and ding of the anachronistic machine offended the delicate sensibilities of those whose fingers trip lightly on laptop keys (but what about the pinging of all that incoming email?). As the Room's executive director explained, "no one wants to work around the clacking of a typewriter." We wonder if the Writer’s Room would have the heart to kick out Brooklyn superstar author Paul Auster, who still bangs out fiction on his trusty Olympia, and whose devotion to the machine even inspired the book The Story of My Typewriter. And is it only a matter of time before the click of laptop keys and trackpads is considered a racket compared to the tap of a touch screen? 

In 2006, Peter Beinart proclaimed that liberals were the only ones who could "Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again," putting a lefty gloss on the neocons' war plans, but oddly he didn't mention Israel's role in America’s “War on Terror.” Now, in an essay in the New York Review of Books, Beinart writes that "morally, American Zionism is in a downward spiral," thanks to its uncritical support for Netenyahu's hard-right coalition government in Israel, against the express wish of most American Jews—especially younger ones—to re-engage the Palestinian peace process.  

Writing from Tel Aviv, Jim Sleeper responds to Beinart's essay, applauding much in it, but judging it "an apostate's over-compensatory ardor against the American Jewish establishment's self-destructive efforts to align public opinion and policy with Israel's ugliest gambits." And in a preview from Bookforum's summer issue, Sleeper reviews Beinart's forthcoming book, The Icarus Syndrome, filling in the backstory of Beinart's blinkered "History of American Hubris." Tablet has posted an interview with Beinart in which he defends his essay's most controversial points. And, at the Daily Beast, Beinart continues to parry with his detractors, writing "Love Israel? Criticize it." The former magazine wunderkind who rarely dissented from the conservative Zionism of Marty Peretz, The New Republic's publisher during Beinart's tenure, now sounds like the sadder and wiser voice of experience.

In an effort to tame the overwhelming BEA experience, eBookNewser has assembled a BEA Digital Toolkit; one tool, Net Galley Buzz, is especially appealing for bookworms too timid to tussle with the sharp-elbowed crowds who swarm booths for galleys—the service allows you to download digital galleys from home.

Last weekend's hyped 48HR magazine found an apt critic in Andrew Losowsky of Stack America, who editorially directed an edition of Colophon magazine produced in two days. Losowsky is disappointed in the finished product: "it simply feels like the worst of both worlds: a slick-looking magazine that feels rushed." At the Times, David Carr calls it a "remarkable artifact," (as the Times itself may soon be). CBS has sent a cease-and-desist letter to 48HR, noting that the network owns the "rights [to] the award-winning news magazine television series." We'd suggest that the publication accelerate its production schedule, but 60 Minutes, is, of course, off limits. We'll have to see what comes of CBS's attempt to pulp the magazine, but in the meantime, you can pick up an issue at MagCloud.

Hurried-writing-as-stunt gets another go-round this week, as author Matt Bell writes a short story live on the Internet at Everyday Genius. Has Apple copyrighted the word "genius" yet?

The book world is buzzing over next week's new Stieg Larsson novel, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. Knopf has unveiled a flashy book trailer, dubbing Larrson's heroine Lisbeth Salander "a one woman vengeance machine." At Salon, Laura Miller writes that Larsson's prose is "as flat and featureless as the Scandinavian landscape," but that the underlying drama, between the flawed order of institutions and a Lisbeth-like anarchy, is "a contest that still captivates us because we all feel those warring impulses within ourselves." At Time, Lev Grossman details the battle over Larsson's legacy (he died in 2004), a "public soap opera in Sweden, with all the elements of a literary thriller: a star-crossed romance, a missing will, a house divided and a mysterious manuscript."

With the World Cup imminent, host nation South Africa will be in the spotlight; The Guardian has rounded up South African authors for a discussion of the country's current scene.

The finalists for the best and worst book trailers have been announced at MobyLives. The Moby crew waded through more than four hundred submissions; this Thursday the winners will be revealed at a gala event at The Griffin. Our favorite nominee is infamously publicity-shy author Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice trailer—in which the author appears only in voice-over—making us nostalgic for his appearance on The Simpsons, and causing daydreams about seeing Pynchon in a tux and a paper bag mask at the ceremony.

Tonight at Bluestockings Books, Kerri Walsh, editor of the Letters of Sylvia Beach, will read from the correspondence of the maven of modernism, who ran Paris's Shakespeare and Company, published Ulysses, and exchanged letters with all of the literary lights of her day.

In search of "literary pyrotechnics with a heart," Bloomsbury USA, known for its non-fiction, is expanding its fiction list, including a new novel by Matthew Sharpe, author of 2008's Jamestown.

As the labyrinthine BEA conference comes to New York next week, the array of events, tables, and booths at the Javits center (as well as the off-site parties) will be a little easier to navigate with the BEA To Go mobile app, which, contra Apple, will work on any web browser. Aside from schedules and maps, the app will have news, twitter feeds, and audio and video, among other handy features.

Penguin Books is celebrating seventy-five years in the biz. We wonder: What will the next seventy-five look like? Perhaps health-care (of all things) can shed some light on the future of publishing. Undoubtedly, the iPad, or a similar device, will be a big part of the story, and Wired wants to know: Is the iPad driving e-book piracy, and does it matter? 

Frankly, we don't give a damn about our looks: Seventy years since the film Gone With the Wind has propelled the novel  to sell more than thirty-millions copies, the Harry Ransom Center archives has unearthed production photos of Scarlett O'Hara, Rhett Butler, Belle Waiting, and the rest of the cast, offering a striking view of the Technicolor characters in mug-shot-like black-and-white.

Two thumbs up: Roger Ebert, the subject of a recent unforgettable Esquire profile, has inked a deal with Grand Central publishing for a 2011 memoir, detailing his battle with cancer and his relationship with buddy and co-host Gene Siskel.

Slouching towards Williamsburg with a Macbook and a book deal: The "hipsterati" and those who hate them have created a vortex of satire and meta-satire that book publishers love to throw money into. 

Russian lit is safe for toddlers, as long as it is in Touch 'n Feel form, ("Run your hand over Raskolnikov's scratchy face. He is feverish and pale") but Moscow subway stations decorated with Dostoevsky's gloomy visage could cause people to hurl themselves onto the tracks.

Triple Canopy's Molly Springfield profiles the Mundaneum, an early twentieth-century Internet, and its visionary creator Paul Otlet. Now with Otlet's scheme realized, tech-writer Nicholas Carr claims to prove that the Internet is rotting your brain.

But perhaps cellphones aren't (a new study is inconclusive); CellPoems has just won an award from the National Book Foundation. The journal texts (and posts) work by poets like Billy Collins and Charles Simic, who write playful poems in which every letter counts—just hold the phone away from your head as you read.

Tonight at Housing Works the Slate Gabfest podcast is going live, with Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and Julia Turner conversing about books and culture, and engaging literary wallflowers with an audience-participation drinking game.

Sloane Crosley, author of the hit memoir I Was Told There'd be Cake, has been promoted to deputy director of publicity at Vintage. Crosley is taking two weeks off from her new gig this summer to embark on a tour for her forthcoming essay collection How Did You Get This Number?, observing first-hand the rigors of on-the-ground book promotion, and picking up tips for her clients as well as plenty of fodder for future volumes. 

Little Orphan Annie has survived many hardships, but has become the latest victim of newspapers' decline.

Novelist Rebecca Goldstein writes as Jorge Luis Borges, penning a story about how the study of literature has turned into an "amalgam of bad epistemology and worse prose," known as Theory; at the LA Times, Carolyn Kellogg imagines Borges "sneaking onto Wikipedia and seeding circular entries designed to perplex, mislead, and amaze." And in a turn of events that might delight Borges, readers can now create books from their favorite Wikipedia articles.

Lost in translation: Books are usually given completely different covers abroad, often with puzzling results—like the Everything is Illuminated cover that turned from a monochromatic scrawl in the US to a raunchy watercolor in France; The Guardian asks the designers to explain.

Bloggers love books because they still dream of the ink-on-paper deal, but whether it is in print or online, literary culture can't afford to lose long form essay.

A long-awaited galley is a signifier of literary cool that outranks all others (at least on the F train); this week in New York, publishing biz insiders will nod knowingly at this hot lit accoutrement, disdaining the lowly iPad—at least for now. Style points aside, we're hoping to find a read so gripping that we miss our subway stop.

Next month, the New Yorker will publish its double fiction issue, in which it will ordain twenty writers under age 40 as the next great American authors—the first such list the magazine has compiled since 1999. The writers on the shortlist will learn if they made the cut this weekend, which may explain the overflow of young chain-smoking scribblers haunting Brooklyn coffee shops and bars, staring at their cell phones—though they tend to do that anyway. Here's who won't make the cut: the too old, the downmarket, the moonlighters, and the disgraced.

What to do about negative reviews? As the lone editor at Time's shrunken book section, Lev Grossman feels an "obligation to champion good literature"; while at Salon, Laura Miller chooses what books to cover in her column and usually shelves books she doesn't like. But without the possibility of a substantive critique, why review books at all?; as Bookforum editor Albert Mobilio points out, literary and non-commercial authors shouldn't get points just for showing up.

Buddhist writer Stephen Prothero, author of God Is Not One, knows he should "sit back and enjoy the ride . . . careening into a new age of media convergence," even when forced to appear in a YouTube video. 

I think I feel a terrible cold coming on.

A room of one's own: Andrew Berman creates the ideal private library and writing studio, but with all that foliage in view, who could get any work done?

Would Jane Austen wear Prada? "Most readers and writers would admit clothing is pretty important in literature as well as in film and drama. There’s a lot of dressing-up going on in the arts," writes Helen Barnes-Bulley. In the 1930s, Nancy Drew had some sexy secrets, including "dainty lingerie," but implored a partner-in-crime to tone down her feminine wiles: "We are going to use strategy, but not charm, so put that frilly frock away." 

"Use your blog to connect. Use it as you. Don’t 'network' or 'promote.' Just talk,” writes Neil Gaiman, winner of the Twitter prize at the Author Blog Awards. Gaiman's American Gods was chosen as the book for One Book, One Twitter, a plan to get "a zillion people all reading and talking about a single book," which started last week. If all this tweeting has got you a-twitter, you need to see "who's got pull in the Publishing Twitterverse."

In an interview at The Comics Reporter, Ben Schwartz, the editor of The Best American Comics Criticism, says "a lot of smart people are thinking about comics in a lot of different ways”; and his volume proves it. It features Schwartz's review of the first volume of the Complete Little Orphan Annie, a book that lets us "reappraise [Harold] Gray, one of the most controversial cartoonists of his generation—and, via his career, American conservatism." (Conservative comics connoisseurs may want to peruse Bluewater publishing's forthcoming issue on Baroness Margaret Thatcher.) The growth of comic book culture continues; the old-fashioned comic-book shop, "a vestige of Norman Rockwell America . . . [is] building actual physical communities, not virtual ones," while comic geeks are also plotting for world domination via the iPad. Meanwhile, there was gloomy news in Manga land, as VIZ media has laid off staff in San Francisco and closed its New York office.

Tonight at the Strand, book designer Chip Kidd discusses Art in Time: Unknown Comic Book Adventures, 1940-1980, with comics critic and Picturebox publisher Dan Nadel.