Karl Ove Knausgaard Last month, NYRB Classics reissued William Gass’s On Being Blue. Tonight at the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, Joshua Cohen, Michael Gorra, and Stefanie Sobelle discuss the book, in a conversation moderated by Bookforum editor Albert Mobilio. The New Republic profiles Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of My Struggle, a six-volume autobiographical novel that speaks in great detail about Knausgaard’s personal life, uses the real names of his family and friends, and has generated an enormous response worldwide. “It fills me with sadness every time I talk about it,” Knausgaard told TNR’s Evan Hughes.

Barbara Ehrenreich At Salon, Thomas Frank talks to Barbara Ehrenreich about her new book, Living With a Wild God, “a memoir with a point,” as Frank dubs it, that is both intellectual autobiography and spiritual inquiry—unusual, maybe, for a self-described atheist. In an interview with Harper’s, Ehrenreich explains the evolution of her reaction to an experience she now describes as mystical: “It took me decades to say, ‘No, I saw something. There was something other than myself there. And I’m going to take that seriously as some sort of empirical evidence, or clue, or glimpse.’” If you’re in New York tonight,

Peter Matthiessen Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, has sold his forthcoming book to OR Books. When Google Met Wikileaks will not only recount the 2011 meeting between Assange and Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt, it will also “outline a potential future for the Internet that would make it faster and much more difficult to censor.” Two and a Half Men star Jon Cryer  and Breaking Bad actor Bryan Cranston are both writing their memoirs. Peter Matthiessen died this weekend at age 86, three days before the publication date of his final novel, In Paradise. Matthiessen was, among other

Yahya Hassan A first book of poems by an eighteen-year-old Danish-Palestinian poet, Yahya Hassan, has sold more than a hundred thousand copies since last fall. The poems, written only in uppercase, criticize the Danish government, the poet’s family, and “Danish Muslims at large for hypocrisy, cheating and failure to adapt.” About the right-wing Danish People’s Party having taken a shine to him, “It’s all the same to me,” Hassan says. “I have the responsibility for my poems. I don’t have any responsibility for what others do with them.” Hassan has received numerous death threats, and been assaulted in a railway station.

John Ashbery Texas senator and Tea Partier Ted Cruz has sold a book to HarperCollins for close to $1.5 million. Cruz has yet to write the book, but apparently it will be “part memoir and part Cruz’s view of how to get Washington to work again as well as his vision of the future for the country.” At Salon, Alex Pareene explains “why liberals should cheer Cruz’s absurd book deal.” If you’re in New York tonight, we recommend going to what promises to be a delightful discussion between Mark Ford and John Ashbery. A story Beckett wrote in 1933,

Salman Rushdie with Patti Smith Jonah Lehrer, who resigned from the New Yorker in 2012 after it was revealed that he had made up quotes, has virtuously turned down a speaking fee for a talk he’ll give this week at the University of Minnesota at Duluth. According to William Payne, head of UMD’s School of Fine Arts, Lehrer plans to discuss “the mistakes he’s made”; the talk’s moderator agrees that “no question is off the table for his entire visit.” In the wake of a recent New York Times article about bookstores fleeing Manhattan, Dustin Kurtz considers bookstores’ role

Gerard Manley Hopkins According to the New York Times, the Ted Hughes estate has denied a biographer access to the poet’s archives. The Hughes estate has gone far to derail Jonathan Bate’s biography, even withdrawing permission to quote the poet at length. The Times speculates that these abrupt actions renew “suggestions that there may be secrets the family still wishes to keep hidden.” In honor of Poetry Month, read Helen Vendler in the LRBon Gerard Manley Hopkins: “Even in profound depression, Hopkins remained immutably honest in aesthetic judgment, a great and rare virtue . . . counterbalancing to the end

Jake Silverstein The New York Times asksNew York Times whether Marx was right. Doug Henwood and a handful of others respond. Henwood reviewed Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century for the April/May issue of Bookforum. (Spoiler: Henwood says yes.) Jake Silverstein, currently the editor of Texas Monthly, has been hired to be the new editor of the New York Times Magazine. According to Times managing editor Dean Baquet, Silverstein will help the magazine build a stronger relationship with the rest of the paper; closer ties with the newsroom, Baquet argues, will give the magazine “a greater sense of urgency.” At the

Shirley Jackson Manhattan has lost forty-four bookstores in twelve years—among them, Spring Street Books, Coliseum Books, Shakespeare and Company, Endicott Booksellers, and Murder Ink. Sarah McNally, of Manhattan’s McNally Jackson, plans to open her store’s second location in Brooklyn. In the New Yorker, Rebecca Mead points to Brooklyn’s thriving independent-bookstore culture, only to lament “a certain kind of book-buying innocence—a time when where one bought a book did not constitute a political statement, and reading it did not feel like participating in a requiem.” The Morning News Tournament of Books enters the championship round, with the entire panel of judges

The New York Public Library has announced the finalists for their 2014 Young Lions Fiction award: Matt Bell, Paul Yoon, Anthony Marra, Chinelo Okparanta, and Jennifer duBois. The winner will be presented with the prize at the library on June 9th. The Royal Canadian Mint honors Alice Munro with a silver coin that shows “an ethereal female figure emerging from a pen.” V. V. Ganeshananthan remembers her friend Matthew Power (a young journalist who died while on assignment in Uganda earlier this month), by taking a close look at one of Power’s stories for Harper’s Magazine, “Mississippi Drift,” and trying to

Jonathan Schell The American writer Jonathan Schell died last night, of cancer, in his home in Brooklyn. From his early work as a young Vietnam War correspondent for the New Yorker, through his meticulous yet sweeping case for nuclear disarmament in The Fate of the Earth, to his magisterial rethinking of state and popular power in The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People, Schell embodied the best of a distinctively American, progressive civic-republican tradition—and of a WASP cultural sensibility about which he was ambivalent and humorously self-deprecating. Schell set a powerful example of dissent while showing defenders of conventional

Teju Cole The New Yorker excerpts Teju Cole’s new/old novel, Every Day is For the Thief. Cole originally published the book in 2007 with Nigeria’s Cassava Republic Press; yesterday, Random House released it in revised form. Yasmine El Rashidi reviews the book in our new issue. The U.K.’s new prohibition on sending books to prisoners has met with outrage. The classics scholar Mary Beard called it “crazy”; the novelist Mark Haddon vowed to get “every writer in the UK publicly opposed to this by tea time.” A petition has already garnered nearly 15,000 signatures. Zoë Heller and Mohsin Hamid consider

Thomas Piketty Paul Krugman christens Capital in the Twenty-First Century, by the French economist Thomas Piketty, “the most important economics book of the year—and maybe the decade.” Piketty argues for a world-wide tax on wealth, like an “an annual property tax,” John Cassidy explains in the New Yorker. In Bookforum, Doug Henwood finds much to praise in Piketty’s work, but is frustrated by the book’s temperate political vision: “For Piketty, the main problem with Marx is his unequivocal call for political confrontation. Having described a process of inexorable material polarization—and with it, increasing plutocratic power over the state—Piketty remains

Carrie Brownstein : “Unruly ronin as well as troubling double agent of the simulacra, Sturtevant remains for me a quintessentially American artist.” Holly George Warren will be on hand at McNally Jackson Books in New York tonight to discuss her biography of rocker Alex Chilton, A Man Called Destruction.

John Lefevre Last month, Simon Schuster canceled its six-figure book contract with writer John Lefevre after it was revealed that Lefevre, who was writing an insider’s account of the financial industry titled Straight to Hell, did not work at Goldman Sachs, as his popular Twitter account had claimed. But Lefevre’s book has proven to be more durable than his credibility. According to publisher Morgan Entrenkin, Grove Press has purchased Straight to Hell, and will publish it in November 2014. “Lorem Ipsum,” the paragraph of nonsense Latin used since the 16th century as dummy text, was designed “to have the

Walter Benjamin In the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Pankaj Mishra and Daniel Mendelsohn discuss canon formation. “How do we know what’s ‘the greatest’? . . . [I]s the agenda always somehow political?” Meanwhile, Jason Diamond agrees with Natasha Vargas-Cooper that the novelist Denis Johnson deserves more recognition. Is Johnson “the most influential living fiction writer in America today”? Maybe, maybe not: over at The Millions, Matt Seidel satirizes the whole business of classification. In Seidel’s host of nonsense categories, novelists are “arthritic” or “lithe”; “robust” or “insinuating”; “hypoallergenic” or “shedding”; and, like their characters, “flat” or “round”

Felix Salmon At the New Yorker’s News Desk blog, novelist and former Air Force pilot James Salter ponders the missing Malaysian airplane, and imagines what it was like to be on board: “There have been no announcements, or, worse, there has been an ominous announcement that causes panic. At some point, the passengers, perhaps coming out of sleep, know.” Meanwhile, at Wired, pilot Chris Goodfellow offers a simple theory about what happened. Felix Salmon analyzes Dorian Nakamoto’s denial that he was the creator of the internet currency scheme, Bitcoin, as reported in Newsweek last week. For universities, hiring off

NoViolet Bulawayo TED-Ed educates the masses on the debate over the Oxford (or “serial”) comma—via video, a medium in which you can avoid the issue altogether. Bookforum, it should go without saying, is pro-Oxford. At Moby Lives, Dustin Kurtz writes that China’s publishing industry, which is “becoming more venal,” “seems to have a rather gross case of the Franzens, and the attention brought by Mo Yan’s Nobel win might be to blame.” The Zimbabwean novelist NoViolet Bulawayo has won the Pen-Hemingway Award for her first novel, We Need New Names. James Franco’s debut collection of poems, Directing Herbert White,

Lydia Davis At Vanity Fair, James Wolcott looks at rise of “name-brand journalists” like Arianna Huffington, Malcolm Gladwell, Ezra Klein, and Nate Silver, and wonders if their enterprises are sustainable: “The demands of being a byline superhero can spread a journalist’s time and focus so thin—all those honoraria to collect!—that he or she may start serving up skimpily researched quickies or, worse, sloppy seconds.” A report on the lack of persons of color in children’s books. The Quarterly Conversation’s spring issue is dedicated to Lydia Davis, including articles and reviews of the American short short-story writer and translator. Among many

Bill Knott The National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced last night. The winners are Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (fiction), Sheri Fink’s Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital (nonfiction), Frank Bidart’s Metaphysical Dog (poetry), Franco Moretti’s Distant Reading (criticism), Amy Wilentz’s Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter From Haiti (autobiography), and Leo Damrosch’s Jonathan Swift (biography). Nate Silver talks about the relaunch of his FiveThirtyEight blog, which goes live Monday afternoon. The poet Bill Knott has died. The author of numerous collections and chapbooks, many of them hand-made, Knott often shunned mainstream recognition: Though he was