Rivka Galchen Rivka Galchen will be appearing tonight at 192 Books in celebration of her new story collection, American Innovations (Farrar, Straus Giroux). Reviewing the book for us, Chloé Cooper Jones calls Galchen’s approach to life and death “an epistemological one.” The Poetry Foundation has awarded this year’s Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize to Nathaniel Mackey, and have posted an interview with Mackey, and a podcast of him reading and talking about his work. The Foundation also announced their award for poetry criticism to the University of California Press for their recent Robert Duncan books, with John Ashbery’s Collected French Translations,

Lynne Segal Salon mourns the closure of the oldest LGBT bookstore in the country, Philadelphia’s Giovanni’s Room. Tim Parks asks why the people who attend book events pose such stupid questions. “The irony perhaps is that what’s mysterious to them is even more mysterious to you.” George Prochnik will speak tonight at the New York Public Library about Austrian novelist and biographer Stefan Zweig, who in the 1920s and ’30s was the bestselling author in the world. Prochnik’s new book, The Impossible Exile (Other Press), is a study of Zweig’s final years in the US and Brazil, where he lived

Hassan Blasim The novel is dead (again). It will still be “be written and read,” Will Self argues in the the Guardian, “but it will be an art form on a par with easel painting or classical music: confined to a defined social and demographic group, requiring a degree of subsidy, a subject for historical scholarship rather than public discourse.” Shares of Twitter ended on Friday at $39.01, and could drop toward $30. But it’s still over-priced, Reuters points out. An interview with Hassan Blasim, author of The Corpse Exhibition, a collection of stories about Iraq. “I still write in

Eileen Myles Buzzfeed took down a post after Maria Popova complained that the site had reposted images that Popova had herself scanned for one of her own articles, about a rare 1995 edition of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, illustrated by Ralph Steadman. According to Popova, Buzzfeed had represented the images out of context, leading her to call the site “the vermin on of the internet–or, for a more context-appropriate metaphor, the pigs of the internet.” The musician and Portlandia star Carrie Brownstein has been cast to perform with Cate Blanchett in Todd Haynes’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel Carol.

Rebecca Lee The 2013 Believer Book Award goes to Rebecca Lee’s Bobcat and Other Stories. Karen Green’s Bough Down wins for poetry. The Academy of American Poets has a new website, which highlights their refurbished Poem-A-Day feature and has the nice option of isolating the poem on the page, uncrowded by boxes or menus or sidebars. Yesterday’s poem was Catie Rosemurgy’s “Star in the Throat, Fire in the Cupboard.” The PEN World Voices festival opened on Monday in New York with a lineup of short, politically focused talks by Noam Chomsky, the Tanzanian political cartoonist Gado, the Syrian poet

Martin Heidegger A survey of 2,234 adults, published yesterday, finds that not much has changed since the poll was last conducted in 2008: apparently our favorite book is still the Bible and we still like Gone with the Wind second-best. There’s some good news: Atlas Shrugged has disappeared from the top ten. Alex Pareene, formerly of Gawker and Salon, joinsFirst Look’s still-unnamed second vertical as executive editor. Pareene will oversee political content for the new magazine, which will focus on politics and finance. Heidegger’s recently published notebooks reveal an anti-Semitism more deeply seated than suspected. At the New Yorker’s Page-Turner

Ellen Willis “Net neutrality” describes a state of affairs in which the companies providing internet act like utilities, delivering service without favoring or blocking particular content. In the name of preserving this ideal, the FCC has recently unveiled a proposal that will in fact degrade it, according to many, in part by allowing internet service providers such as Verizon, Comcast, and ATT to create what amount to fast and slow lanes. At the Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal and Adrienne LaFrance offer a primer on the new proposal, and the Columbia Journalism Review suggests five ideas for reinventing internet policy. Check out

Alice Goffman Dustin Rowles writes about Salon’s decision to rewrite the headline of his recent and well-read think piece about “how we treat violent and sexual crimes differently.” As he points out, the new headline clashes with the actual intentions of the article. “Now, when I saw that headline, I didn’t even realize it was my piece at first, and I was pissed before I’d even read it.” The University of Chicago Press is hoping that Alice Goffman’s On the Run, a work of sociology that follows a small group of young black men in a Philadelphia neighborhood for

Franco Moretti At Salon, Laura Miller interviews the literary theorist Franco Moretti, whose methods are largely quantitative and whose work avoids focusing on a few universally approved texts. “I’m interested in understanding the culture at large, rather than just its best results,” he explains. “I have no doubt that canonical books are best—although we can spend days arguing what ‘best’ means. But it’s not enough for me to understand that. I want to understand the broader conventions, the field of attempts and failures, hoping that that may tell us something significant about the culture we live in or that others

Pavel Durov Writing that draws on lived experience and real people never merely reflects, argues Leslie Jamison in the New York Times Bookends column: It distorts, inverts, reinvents; it offers “a set of parallel destinies.” The “peril” of using real people is two-fold: ”what it will do to your work, and what it will do to your life.” Pavel Durov, the founder of Russia’s most popular social networking site, VKontakte, has been fired from his position as CEO. Durov claims that VKontakte is now under the “complete control” of two close allies of Putin. Russia “is incompatible with Internet

Gillian Flynn Gillian Flynn took to Reddit on Tuesday for an AMA (“Ask Me Anything”), reassuring fans that the Gone Girl screenplay will not stray too far from the novel. Flavorwire compiled a list of things they learned from the QA, including Flynn’s reading list, the process behind the “cool girl” speech, and why she is okay with unlikeable characters: “I think you can forgive a lot if a person makes you laugh (even if you know you shouldn’t be laughing).” Speaking of adaptations, relatives of David Foster Wallace say they do not endorse the upcoming movie The End

Leslie Jamison Publishers Weekly looks ahead to the best books of the summer, including John Waters’s hitchhiking memoir; an updated Philip Marlowe novel from John Banville (writing as Benjamin Black); another Bolaño; and NYRB classics from Jean-Patrick Manchette and Alberto Moravia. Elon Green talks to Adam Begley, whose biography of John Updike was just published, about writing the book’s vivid deathbed scene. An interview with Leslie Jamison, author of the The Empathy Exams: “I think shame is a powerful signal—like a fever—of some internal struggle. I mean, shame comes attached to many things—often traumatic things, and I would never

Christopher Sorrentino At the New Republic Paul Berman remembers Gabriel García Márquez, celebrating the “lordly grandeur” of the Nobel-winning author’s work. The Paris Review has posted a conversation with Austin fiction writer Bill Cotter about his new novel, The Parallel Apartments, and the brutish and short violence it contains: “I wanted to prod the reader through an impossible, unlivable universe that he might be glad to escape at the end of the book—but the nature of violence, in real life, is always fast and furious. If it wasn’t, we could simply dodge it.” Christopher Sorrentino—author of the Patty Hearst-inspired

Malcolm Gladwell Gabriel Garcia Marquez died yesterday at the age of 87. He won the Nobel Prize in 1982, and his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude is a cornerstone of magical-realist fiction. His philosophy might be boiled down to a statement he once made to the Paris Review: “A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it.” Disgraced journalist Jonah Lehrer has launched a new blog, and Malcolm Gladwell recommends that you read it. Colm Toibin has been chosen to serve as the chairman of the PEN World Voices Festival, starting

E.L. Doctorow Jim Romenesko reports that investigative reporter Chris Hamby has left CPI to work for Buzzfeed—only two days after winning a Pulitzer prize. “I’m thrilled to be joining a powerhouse team that will combine the time-honored rigors of investigative journalism with the creativity, technological prowess and reach of BuzzFeed,” Hamby says. In related news, ABC has accused CPI of downplaying the network’s contributions to Hamby’s yearlong report, which exposed how doctors, lawyers, and coal-industry executives worked together to deny medical benefits to miners suffering from black lung. CPI has responded to ABC News President Ben Sherwood with an

Lee Boudreaux Google is looking to expand its headquarters. They want a building big enough to hold 3,000 of its employees—which apparently means something “half the size of the Chrysler Building.” On Sunday Stephen King tweeted the end of a Game of Thrones episode and sparked the outrage of his 370,000 Twitter followers. King has been happily spoiling numerous shows since he joined Twitter a few months ago, and was unmoved by the uproar. “Romeo and Juliet die in Act 5,” he tweeted a few minutes later. FSG has changed the covers of their paperback versions of Karl Ove

Donna Tartt The Guardian US and the Washington Post both collected Public Service Pulitzers for stories related to Edward Snowden’s leaks. Snowden has publicly declared the award a “vindication” of his actions and the larger inquiry into “domestic surveillance practices”; the Prize board, meanwhile, nervously insists that their granting of the award is about recognizing good journalism and shouldn’t be understood as an endorsement of Snowden. The fiction award went to Donna Tartt’s Goldfinch. Dave Eggers has a new novel coming out in June, a mere eight months after his last, The Circle, which was published in October. The

John Jeremiah Sullivan David Mitchell has a new novel, The Bone Clocks, coming out this September, and has reportedly signed a three-book deal with Random House. The new novel is another decade-spanning, genre-hopping epic, clocking in at about 700 pages. John Jeremiah Sullivan’s riveting New York Times Magazine essay on two mysterious prewar blues singers artfully integrates audio, video, and pictures—a rare example of the Web’s bells and whistles actually working to draw out the complexities of a literary story. This weekend, the LA Times announced the winners of its Book Prize. The New York Times profiles the survival (and rise)

Choire Sicha In honor of National Library Week, Oxford University Press is temporarily making its many online tools free. (Username: libraryweek; password: libraryweek.) Hillary Clinton’s memoir will be in stores this June. The book recalls her time as secretary of state, and includes “candid reflections about key moments.” Quora, a question-and-answer site that aspires to Wikipedia status, has raised eighty million dollars to expand their operations. The site claims to have 500,000 topics currently “live.” The Guggenheim Foundation announces its 2014 fellows. Among the recipients are Chloe Aridjis, Deborah Baker, Susan Bernofsky, Emily Fox Gordon, Joy Harjo, Yunte Huang,

Muriel Spark At the New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog, Parul Sehgal considers the work of Muriel Spark, on the occasion of New Directions reissuing her work. Spark’s cruel and beautiful fiction teaches us, Sehgal says, “how powerlessness can make you an expert in the art of appraisal—in assessing someone’s market price down to the penny.” Tonight at the Brooklyn Public Library, PEN is holding a reading to promote freedom of speech in China. The event will feature Sergio De La Pava, Jennifer Egan, Ha Jin, Alison Klayman, Chang-rae Lee, and Victoria Redel. Opponents of the city’s plans to overhaul the