With Melville House books lining the walls of the fictional independent publisher in Lena Dunham’s show Girls, viewers could be forgiven for thinking that Dunham’s character was meant to be interning at the Brooklyn-based house (we did). But that’s not the case, says the Los Angeles Times. In 2006, at the recommendation of Lynne Tillman, Dunham interned at Soft Skull books under then-editor Richard Nash. "Oberlin kids were always smart and industrious," Nash said, referring to his former intern. "My bestselling authors were from Oberlin: David Rees, Matt Sharp... You basically said yes to Oberlin students when they wanted to intern." And as for the Melville House books, the publisher wouldn’t let them film in the office, so HBO rented their books to fill on-set shelves.
The Jana Partners hedge fund has purchased 6.59 million shares of Barnes & Noble, giving them an 11.6 percent stake in the company. As Publishers Weekly points out, Jana is a company "known for taking an activist role in companies in which it invests."
Hitler’s Mein Kampf hasn’t been published in Germany since the end of WWII, but that is expected to change when the book’s copyright expires in 2015. So to limit the potential damage that the book might cause when it returns to print, the German state of Bavaria—which owns the copyright to Mein Kampf—announced plans to publish an annotated version of the book that lays out "the global catastrophe that this dangerous way of thinking led to." According to Bavarian officials, an annotated English edition is also in the works—and an audiobook.
Joshua Cohen has won a Pushcart Prize for his short story “Emissions,” which was originally published in The Paris Review last summer, and will appear in his collection of novellas, Four New Messages, to be published by Graywolf Press in August. The story is available to read here. Hnd here is Adam Wilson’s review of Cohen’s novel A Heaven of Others. The Los Angeles Review of Books was nominated for two Pushcart Prizes—one for David Shields’s essay “Life is Short; Art is Shorter,” and another for Antoine Wilson’s “Notes on Hack.”
The Asian American Literary Review considers charge that Tao Lin is a “‘human meme,’ a walking, typing gimmick who routinely and unjustly captures milliseconds of the cultural hivemind’s time through his not-all-that-clever stunts.”
