Norman Mailer In a move befitting the maestro himself, Observer reporter Nate Freeman gets into a fistfight at the book party for J. Michael Lennon’s new Norman Mailer biography. Though it’s only been out for a week, Morrissey’s autobiography has rocketed to the top of the UK bestseller list, making it one of the fastest-selling memoirs ever. Morrissey’s Penguin Classic has already sold around 35,000 copies in Britain. (Only Kate McCann’s 2011 memoir Madeleine, about the disappearance of her daughter, did better, selling 72,500 copies the first week.) Mysteriously, there’s still no sign that it will be released in the US. Here are three “idiot-proof formulas” for

The digitization of the world’s great writers continues apace: Thanks to a new open-access website, thousands of manuscripts by Emily Dickinson will be available for the first time in a single place. The site will pool the holdings of Amherst, Harvard, the Boston Public Library, and five other institutions, and will include facsimiles of Dickinson’s handwritten poems, scraps of paper, used envelopes, and other materials. The New York Times notes that the creation of the Emily Dickinson Archive has also revived “decades-old tensions between Harvard and Amherst, which hold the two largest Dickinson collections.” If you want a preview of what will

John Ashbery, photo by Bill Hayward Bookforum editor Albert Mobilio pays a visit to John Ashbery’s Hudson, New York, home—as it has been reproduced in the city for a new show at the Loretta Howard Gallery. In addition to “a selection of Ashbery’s own paintings, prints, collages, bric-a-brac, and furniture,” the exhibition includes “kitschy figurines, VHS tapes, … bawdy toys,” all of which “evoke the multifariousness of consciousness” and create the impression of “standing inside one of Ashbery’s poems.” From October 18 to 25, indie publisher OR Books will be running a pop-up bookshop at Alexandra, a restaurant in

Donna Tartt At the Guardian, Jim Crace digests Morrissey’s sweeping new biography into a much more manageable six hundred words: “At school, I am the futile pupil brutalised by neo-fascist inquisitors who do not understand the subtleties of sublime rhyme. My only valent talent is for athletics, my event the 20-kilometre walk on water. Blood laced with disgrace flows from my hands, feet and side. ‘Oh, Steven,’ says my Mother Mary. ‘What have you done to yourself now?’” The notion that in order to write you must “kill all your darlings” has been attributed to Oscar Wilde, Eudora Welty, G.K.

Alice Munro Junot Diaz and Maya Angelou were among the writers honored at the fifth annual Norman Mailer Center Benefit Gala this week. The awards celebrate authors at various stages of their career, not all of whom were particularly fond of the event’s namesake: “I am still at odds with Mr. Mailer,” said Angelou. “If we had talked together, we would not agree. But he writes so well.” And Junot Diaz, when asked what Mailer’s work means to him, said: “It depends on what Mailer we’re talking about.” When the Leo Tolstoy State Museum put out a call for

At Page Turner, Richard Brody wonders why Norman Mailer never wrote “the book that he was born to write—the bildungsroman of a Maileresque boy in Brooklyn in the nineteen-thirties.” Early reviews are in for Morrissey’s long-awaited autobiography, and they’re all over the map. The Telegraph delivers a rave, praising the book’s “beautifully measured prose style” (and calling it “certainly the best written musical autobiography since Bob Dylan’s Chronicles”), while The Guardian is less convinced. “For its first 150 pages, Autobiography comes close to being a triumph,“ writes John Harris, “but after pages and pages of moaning, it all starts

The finalists for the 2013 National Book Awards have been announced. In fiction, they’re Rachel Kushner for The Flamethrowers, Jhumpa Lahiri for The Lowland, James McBride for The Good Lord Bird, Thomas Pynchon for Bleeding Edge, and George Saunders for Tenth of December. In nonfiction, they’re Jill Lepore for Book of Ages, Wendy Lower for Hitler’s Furies, George Packer for The Unwinding, Alan Taylor for The Internal Enemy, and Lawrence Wright for Going Clear. The rest of the nominees are available here.Courtesy of The Onion: “10 Sandwiches that Look Like British Novelist Martin Amis.” In an interview with the Guardian, recently

Ronan Farrow Eleanor Catton has won the Man Booker Prize for The Luminaries, an eight-hundred-plus page novel set in 19th century New Zealand. And that’s not all: at 28, she’s the youngest Booker winner ever. There are 300,000 people in Iceland, and according to recent statistics, one in ten of them will eventually publish a book. This might account for the Icelandic phrase “ad ganga med bok I maganum”—that every Icelander “has a book in their stomach.” A textbook rental company in Sydney Australia has partnered with a company that specializes in unmanned aerial vehicles, a.k.a. drones, to develop what

HBO and Sony are among the studios fighting for the rights to adapt Glenn Greenwald’s forthcoming tell-all book about Edward Snowden—even though the project comes with so many thorny legal issues that one studio, 20th Century Fox, has already pulled out. Aside from the fact that there’s no ending yet, the story is likely to draw lots of government scrutiny, and it’s unclear whether Greenwald and collaborator Laura Poitras will be willing to sell their life rights.

Hipsters have turned on Dave Eggers, reports the Globe and Mail. Justin Slaughter is a critic and journalist in Brooklyn.Eggers became a cultural icon after the release of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and the creation of McSweeneys, but his latest novel—The Circle, a “dystopian science-fiction story” about a Google-like “evil Internet empire that controls all social media”—has left many of his fans feeling as if they have been “targeted by its satire.” Hilary Mantel’s award-winning novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies are making the leap from the BBC to a PBS costume drama. The books, which chronicle “meteoric

[All images courtesy of The Frost Library, Amherst College © Amherst College.] \ The cottage industry around Emily Dickinson churns out diversions at a steady pace: A new photograph purporting to show the poet was unearthed last fall, theories about her love life appear with US\-magazine like regularity, and a 2010 novel, The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, attempted to channel the belle of Amherst and transform her into a book-club-ready heroine. As fun as these odds and ends can be, discoveries that shed light on Dickinson’s work—rather than on her persona—are rare. But The Gorgeous Nothings, forthcoming from

Josef Stalin, editor. Is Stalin best understood as an editor? From the Chronicle of Higher Education: “Even when not wielding his [signature] blue pencil, Stalin’s editorial zeal was all-consuming. He excised people—indeed whole peoples—out of the manuscript of worldly existence, had them vanished from photographs and lexicons, changed their words and the meanings of their words, edited conversations as they happened, backing his interlocutors into more desirable (to him) formulations.” Bloomberg Businessweek runs an excerpt of Brad Stone’s The Everything Store, a forthcoming book about Jeff Bezos and the ascent of Amazon. Here’s a terrifying little nugget about the

Lore Segal It’s very popular to wring your hands over the death of the book (and the industries that go along with it), but publishing isn’t actually doing as badly as many people think, writes Evan Hughes at the New Republic. At the end of the day, books are still products that people want to purchase—in print or digitally—and the numbers bear that out. Since 2008, “e-book revenue has skyrocketed—by more than 4,500 percent. Just as important, the boom has come at surprisingly little expense to higher- priced hardcovers and paperbacks, sales of which are only slightly down.” Lore

Andrew Wylie Accuracy, tone, and directness: At the New York Times Book Review, Daniel Mendelsohn and Dana Stevens discuss the qualities they look for in a good translation. Superagent Andrew Wylie talks with the New Republic about his e-publishing initiative, the rise of Amazon (“I am not one of those who thinks that Amazon’s publishing business is an effort marked by sincerity”), and why the London Book Fair is “like being at a primary school in Lagos.” How is William Boyd’s new James Bond different from the hard-nosed 007 of yore? For one thing, says Boyd, he’s much more

A pirated book stall in Peru New Yorkers: Come to ApexArt tonight for the latest installment of Bookforum editor Albert Mobilio’s Double Take—an evening that asks three pairs of authors to “trade takes on a shared experience.” Tonight’s event will have Christopher Sorrentino and Andrew Hultkrans considering Richard Nixon on his centenary, Cathy Park Hong and Nelly Reifler imagining futuristic surveillance, and Mary Jo Bang and Timothy Donnelly reporting on reading Kafka’s Amerika. A scrappy little lab at Columbia is looking at book piracy. The organization, piracy.lab, grew out of Professor Dennis Tenen’s observation that people in comparative literature

The journal Science has published a study in which two New School psychologists argue that reading “literary fiction, as opposed to popular fiction or serious nonfiction,” will improve your social skills and your emotional intelligence. According to the study, a book by Chekhov will make you more empathetic than one by Gillian Flynn. (Mary Gaitskill would probably agree.) Yes, Morrissey’s much, much-anticipated autobiography is coming out this month. The book will be released on October 17th in the UK as a Penguin Classic—rare for a living author. Representatives say that Morrissey currently “has no contract with a publisher for the

Portrait of John Ashbery, c.1968, oil on canvas, 20 ¼ x 18 inches. [All images courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York ] \ Jane Freilicher: Painter Among Poets The painter Jane Freilicher met poet John Ashbery in New York City in 1949. A the time she lived upstairs from Kenneth Koch, who would become known—along with Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler—as a member of the New York School Poets. Though best known as wrters, all four members of the New York School were deeply interested in art (Ashbery and Schuyler went on to be art critics, and

A real book. “Is monster erotica lucrative?” New York Magazine talks to two Texas college students who have made more than mid-career accountants and engineers at Boeing by writing adult novels with titles like Taken By the T-Rex and Ravished by the Triceratops. At the Page Turner blog, Adelle Waldman considers why (and how) novelists fail to adequately address the subject of female beauty. The new, all digital Newsweek is staffing up, and they’ve already poached some good writers, including Jezebel’s Katie Baker and the New York Times’s Karla Zabludovsky. Dave Eggers released a statement this week in response

In a thinly veiled attempt to make sure that nobody ever turns off their Kindle, Amazon has been prodding the Federal Aviation Administration to revise their rules about turning off electronic devices during takeoff and landings. Recent tests conducted both by Amazon and an FAA panel have found that use of electronics—contrary to conventional wisdom—have no effect on planes. Even though Norman Rush is often credited with writing one of the most psychologically nuanced female characters in contemporary fiction (the unnamed narrator of Mating), that doesn’t mean that he’s especially good at writing women, argues Ruth Franklin at The

Bestselling author Tom Clancy died this morning of undisclosed caused as a hospital in Baltimore. He was sixty-six. The Times has more.  In a puzzled and negative review of Jonathan Franzen’s The Kraus Project, Dwight Garner wonders how Franzen “could loom so tall in his novels yet seem so shriveled in his nonfiction,” and notes that while Franzen’s “drive-by pea shootings” on technology fall short, the author’s “whole mode of being — the way he mostly runs silent and deep, issuing a novel every 10 years or so, refusing to embrace social media — was already his most incisive possible rebuke