Adelle Waldman Could the CIA be the most literary government agency? Consider its possible ties to the Paris Review, and to the Iowa Writers Workshop. Robert W. Chambers’s 1895 story collection The King in Yellow features a play that is so full of terrible truths that it drives viewers insane. The book has been an influence on many writers: H.P. Lovecraft, and now Nic Pizzolatto, the author behind HBO’s True Detective. The vivid miniseries is littered with references to Chambers’s work, hinting that the moody drama may get even darker—and more supernatural. For more on the show, see Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s

Anne Carson Arundhati Roy, William Dalrymple, and Neil Gaiman are among the writers who have condemned Penguin’s decision to collect and destroy Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus in India. Penguin decided to pull the book from shelves in response to legal threats, based on the assertion that Doniger’s study, published in 2009, “hurts the feelings of millions of Hindus.” The shortlist for the Folio Prize, the first major literary award to consider English-language fiction and poetry from all over the world, has been announced. Five of the eight nominees are American: Bookforum contributor Rachel Kushner, Amity Gaige, Kent Haruf,

Wendy Doniger Penguin India is planning to recall and destroy all copies of scholar Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus: An Alternative History that are currently for sale in India. This measure is the publisher’s response to legal threats made by Hindu nationalists, who have decried the book for “inaccurately representing the religion and offering an overly sexual interpretation of Hindu texts.” The lawsuit against the book, filed by Dina Nath Batra, the head of a Hindu education group in New Delhi, claims that the book has “has hurt the religious feelings of millions of Hindus,” and therefore violates a

According to the blog EV Grieve, novelist and performer Maggie Estep died earlier this week. In the early ’90s, Estep was a vital presence in the East Village spoken-word scene. She appeared regularly on MTV and toured with the Lallapalooza festival in 1994. She has written seven novels, including Diary of an Emotional Idiot (1997) and, more recently, the horsetrack noirs Hex (2003) and Flamethrower (2010).

Hilary Mantel Ursula Lindsey reports on the 2014 Cairo International Book Fair. At the New Yorker, George Packer has written a thorough history of Amazon, and asks if the superstore is “bad for books.” Packer writes: “Amazon is not just the ‘Everything Store,’ to quote the title of Brad Stone’s rich chronicle of Bezos and his company; it’s more like the Everything. What remains constant is ambition, and the search for new things to be ambitious about.” AA Gill has received the annual Hatchet Job Award for his acerbic review of Morrissey’s Autobiography, which the critic called “a cacophony

Stuart Hall The Wilson Quarterly has drastically cut its staff and will likely cease publication after four decades of distinguished journalism. Paul Maliszewski, a longtime reader and occasional contributor to the quarterly, reflects on the magazine’s past and tries to get answers about its future. Influential cultural theorist Stuart Hall has died at the age of 82. The conservative imprint Threshold Editions is planning a biography of Chris Christie, which is scheduled to be published in the spring of 2015. The book’s author, Matt Katz, has reported on the governor for his blog, the Christie Chronicles, as well as

Alexander Chee Novelist Alexander Chee has written a thoughtful and eloquent essay about Twitter outrage, Twitter apologies, and how they reflect the world we live in now. “Who knows what we thought we’d get when we let the Internet into our lives,” Chee states, “but whatever it was, what we have now is paper tigers burning in the hot wind of the 4G network—and we are racing after them to watch them burn.” In a recently translated essay, W. G. Sebald considers his long fascination with Robert Walser, the endlessly enigmatic Swiss writer: “Who and what Robert Walser really was is

Haruki Murakami According to eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, First Look will launch its first digital magazine next week. The new site will be run by Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Jeremy Scahill, and it will kick off with a number of reported pieces on the NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden. First look is also announcing three new hires, journalists Marcy Wheeler, Ryan Gallagher, and Peter Maass, who recently wrote a very interesting article about Poitras and the Snowden leaks for the New York Times Magazine. Earlier this week, The New York Observer published a scathing critique of the Times editorial page,

This week, OR Books is launching Gay Propaganda, a collection of LGBT stories from Russia, edited by journalist Masha Gessen (author of many books, including Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot) and American activist Joseph Huff-Hannon. Gay Propaganda’s release is timed to coincide with the opening of the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, a country where not only is violence against gays and lesbians rampant, but being out makes you a de facto enemy of the Putin regime. For more on what it is like to be LGBT in Russia, see Jeff Sharlet’s recent GQ article,

Andrew Rosenthal Roxane Gay has sold her forthcoming book, Hunger: A Weight Memoir, to Harper.

Zadie Smith JK Rowling claims in an interview that it was a mistake to pair off Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger. Hermione, Rowling claims, should have wound up in love with Harry Potter. “Am I breaking people’s hearts by saying this?” she asks. Maybe not, but some fans are apparently “outraged”: “”Well thanks Jo for kicking down 10 years of what I consider to be the most beautiful, unconditional bare bones real relationship that could ever exist between 2 people,” writes one Harry Potter fan on the Leaky Cauldron site. The NYPL invited author and translator Susan Bernofsky and

Rene Ricard Rene Ricard—the artist, critic, and poet—has died. Ricard appeared in films by Andy Warhol and wrote influential Artforum articles about Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Francesco Clemente; his poetry collections include God with Revolver. At Hyperallergic, Morton Hoi Jensen reports on Triple Canopy’s third annual marathon reading of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans. When the FBI arrested the man who founded Silk Road on drug-trafficking charges, many people who frequented this online black market were faced with a crisis: Where to continue their book club? In a trend worthy of Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge, literary discussions are

Susan Sontag Author Alain de Botton is leading a new news organization—run entirely by philosophers. The Philosopher’s Mail claims to have bureaus in London, Amsterdam, and Melbourne, and is “committed to bringing you the latest, biggest stories, as interpreted by philosophers rather than journalists.” Check out the homepage, which currently offers philosophical takes on tabloid-ready topics such as “Anne Hathaway takes her chocolate labrador Esmeralda for a walk.” Susan Sontag wrote 17,198 emails. Benjamin Moser, who is writing a biography of Sontag, recently read them. At the New Yorker, he describes the “feeling of creepiness and voyeurism” he experienced

Poetry by Sappho Following the Washington Post’s decision to not fun Ezra Klein’s new online venture (a decision that publisher Katharine Weymouth has defended), the paper has announced in a memo to staffers that it plans to hire a new bloggers and redesign the website. Oxford papyrologist Dirk Obbink has determined that two poems written on a tattered piece of papyrus were written by Sappho. One of the poems refers to the author’s family; the other is addressed to the Greek goddess Aphrodite. Since it launched 13 years ago, Inside.com has been “part of a Steve Brill mashup, a

Jimmy Carter Former US president Jimmy Carter is writing “an impassioned account of the human rights abuses against women and girls around the world, particularly in religious societies,” according to Simon Schuster, which is planning to publish the book in late March. The MIT Media Lab is teaching a class this semester that aims to make science fiction real. Emphasizing “pataphysics,” or the science of imaginary solutions, the class is taught by Sophia Brueckner and Dan Novy and features William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age, and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? on the syllabus,

Kathy Acker Four out of twelve writers named the late, great Kathy Acker among the authors of “books that changed my life,” for a project by n+1 that grew out of an index for the magazine’s “No Regrets” series. Acker is cited for the novels The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by The Black Tarantula (1973), Kathy Goes to Haiti (1978), Great Expectations (1983), and Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream (1986). Dennis Cooper, Mary Shelley, Virginia Woolf, and Frank O’Hara also received multiple mentions. Egypt’s National Library and Archives, in Cairo’s Bab al-Khalq neighborhood, suffered structural damage on

Philip Roth As Jonathan Mahler points out, our current journalistic environment is one that fetishizes longer articles—“even high-metabolism sites like BuzzFeed and Politico are producing their own long-form content.” But does a higher word-count mean higher quality? Mahler’s assessment of the latest long-form trend is too measured to say that it’s all bad, but he does note what’s missing from a lot of immersive journalism today: empathy. Nixon didn’t talk much about contemporary American authors, but as Jon Wiener writes, he anxiously wanted to discuss Philip Roth. “Roth is a bad man,” the president told Charles Colson in 1971.

Richard Nash Richard Nash has joined the staff of Byliner, the digital reading service that delivers long-form journalism and fiction to subscribers. Nash, once the publisher of Soft Skull Press and currently the publisher of Red Lemonade, is leaving his position as VP at Small Demons, the company that indexed every |https://www.smalldemons.com/books/Infinite_Jest_David_Foster_Wallace_(1996)|cultural reference| in Infinite Jest. Last fall, Small Demons reported that without a buyer, it would have to close shop. According to the Financial Times, CNN has laid off forty senior staff members, “including a pregnant producer who was two weeks away from giving birth to twins.” Another

Binyavanga Wainaina In response to anti-gay laws recently passed in Nigeria and Uganda, Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina, author of books such as One Day I Will Write About This Place and editor of the Nairobi-based journal Kwani, has revealed that he is gay. Triple Canopy has announced the lineup for its third annual marathon reading of Gertrude Stein’s novel The Making of Americans. The event will start this Friday at 5pm and conclude sometime Sunday night, and readers will include Amy Sillman, Lynne Tillman, Charles Bernstein, and many others. If you can’t make it to Triple Canopy’s Brooklyn space,

Ezra Klein Journalist and policy analyst Ezra Klein is leaving the Washington Post to “start his own venture.” The Times reports that Klein, who runs the paper’s Wonkblog, recently approached publisher Katharine Weymouth to discuss launching a new, WaPo\-backed website “dedicated to explanatory journalism on a wide range of topics beyond political policy.” Weymouth and the the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, decided not to support the venture, so Klein is setting out to start the site elsewhere—and taking two Wonkblog staffers with him. As Bookforum editor |about:blank|Chris Lehmann| quips: “At last—a Buzzfeed for smug wonk meritocrats!” Not to be