The Shanghai metro (AP) Contrary to claims that an excerpt of Jonathan Lethem’s Dissident Gardens in the New York Times’ T Magazine marked the first time that the Gray Lady had included the f-word in print, Jim Romenesko points out that the paper runs the expletive all the fucking time. A Shanghai metro line has introduced its own library that allows riders to take out a book when they get on the train and return it when they’ve reached their destination. From the Los Angeles Times: “Special bookshelves are installed at the metro stations, containing rows books for the

From Is Sex Necessary? by E.B. White and James Thurber At Outward, Slate’s new LGBT blog, Masha Gessen explains why Putin’s crackdown on gay families prompted her to leave Russia. Parks and Rec star Aziz Ansari has signed a $3.5 million deal with Penguin Press to write an “investigation” into modern romance and online dating. In a statement, Ansari said the book would address the “entirely new era for singles, in which the basic issues facing a single person—whom we meet, how we meet them, and what happens next—have been radically altered by new technologies.” Congratulations to Jonathan Lethem

Sergio de la Pava A forthcoming documentary on J.D. Salinger has so far been shrouded in secrecy, but with the film coming out soon, details are starting to emerge. Among them, one “big reveal” is that before he died Salinger “instructed his estate to publish at least five additional books — some of them entirely new, some extending past work — in a sequence that he intended to begin as early as 2015.” Included are new stories about the Glass and Caulfield families. The film also elaborates on Salinger’s personal relationships, including his marriage to his first wife, who

William Vollman: Not the Unabomber. In the recent issue of Harper’s, William Vollmann talks about getting ahold of his FBI file through a Freedom of Information Act request, and learning that he was suspected both of being the Unabomber and the anthrax mailer. Vollmann was dubbed “Unabomber Suspect Number S-2047” after an anonymous tipster sent his name to the FBI, telling the Bureau that the author “owns many guns and a flame-thrower.” And that wasn’t the only thing the feds found suspicious: “UNABOMBER, not unlike VOLLMANN has pride of authorship and insists his book be published without editing,” the

Viktoriya Degtyareva’s GAYS. They Changed the World “What ever happened to the Best Music Writing series?” As Vice reports, the 2012 issue, which was supposed to be edited by ?uestlove, was never published, although $17,733 was donated towards the book via Kickstarter. Where’s the money? Series editor Daphne Carr says, “I have no comment.” Jonathan Lethem has put together an annotated playlist of songs that inspired his forthcoming novel, Dissident Gardens. Gang of Four, Lou Reed, and Bob Dylan all make appearances. Only seven months after Barnes and Noble founder Leonard S. Riggio announced his intent to buy 675

A Hogarth Press edition of T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland.” The Columbia Journalism Review has run an article about The New Inquiry and praises their $2-a-month subscription plan, which has been called a “model that might save the little magazine for the Internet era.” A stalemate that has lasted most of the year between Barnes and Noble and Simon and Schuster came to a close this week after the companies released a statement saying that they had “resolved their outstanding business issues.” The problems began earlier this year, when Barnes and Noble “sharply increased its demands on publishers” and stocked

A still from “Black Crown.” Three months after releasing Black Crown—a book-cum-video game that “puts you in the role of a clerk working for the Widsith Institute, a mysterious organisation undergoing a digitization project”—Random House says that nearly six thousand people have signed up to play Rob Sherman’s interactive novel. The book is free, but users can pay small amounts to get early access to story branches—Random House releases new content every week, and about 65% of it has already been made available. At the Atlantic Wire, Alexander Abad-Santos says that although the book has not ”gone viral, it

A shirt with the entire text of “Hamlet” printed on it. Since publishing his first book of short stories three years ago, James Franco has released poetry collections and memoir. He has a novel coming out this fall. And he’s been in various graduate programs and movies. So upon hearing the news that Franco is writing the foreword to a new Damion Searls translation of Hermann Hesse’s novel Demian, David Ulin at the Los Angeles Times says that it’s time for Franco to give it a rest. “Let’s be honest,” Ulin writes, “he’s in over his head.” Flavorwire rounds

Boris Kachka talks to the Awl about the ouroboric (and very insidery) process of writing and selling a book about the publishing house Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Salman Rushdie argued that we currently live in an age of “offendedness”: “Classically, we have defined ourselves by the things we love. By the place which is our home, by our family, by our friends. But in this age we’re asked to define ourselves by hate. That what defines you is what pisses you off. And if nothing pisses you off, who are you?” The

Amazon Publishing is launching a new biography series called Icons, which will “will focus on canonical figures in the culture, both historical and contemporary,” and will be “written by a range of celebrated authors.” They just announced the first titles in the series, and out of ten books—including ones on Lucian Freud, David Lynch, and Ernest Hemingway—only one, on Hannah Arendt, will be about a woman. In an interview this week, the editor of V.C. Andrews’s incest thriller Flowers in the Attic, about a pair of twins trapped in an attic by their mother, let slip that the novel

Our favorite slideshow of the day is David Woolfall’s series of portraits of women who write erotic fiction … and the very dirty captions that are excerpted from their books. A woman walks into a bookstore and wonders aloud if the Brian Stelter book she’s picked up is any good. The guy next to her remarks, “Actually it is. I’m Brian Stelter.” The New York Times media reporter explains how he shills his book. Chooseco, the company behind more than 180 “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, has launched a Kickstarter campaign to bring the ’80s ooks into the twenty-first

Aaron Swartz It’s getting harder and harder for longform journalists to support themselves writing, especially now that big media outlets are tweaking staff writer contracts to make sure that if articles get optioned for movies, magazines get a portion of the payout. This is why Joshuas Bearman and Davis have started Epic, “a kind of online literary platform that will commission and publish big, nonfiction narratives that might also make good movies.” The idea is that the money made over “the entire life” of an article—”magazine fees, sales on Audible.com and Amazon Kindle Singles, ancillary film and television rights”—will

A still from The Canyons, which was written by Bret Easton Ellis John Grisham has written a forceful op-ed in the New York Times attacking the Obama administration for its handling of Guantanamo Bay and the ongoing human-rights abuses that have been taking place there. Grisham came to the issue after learning that his books had been forbidden to detainees. Many months ago, Bret Easton Ellis agreed to review the book of anybody who donated $5,000 to his Kickstarter-funded film The Canyons (starring Lindsay Lohan and James Deen). Last week, Vice ran the first of the reviews, a mainly

Lewis Lapham talks to the New York Times about smoking e-cigarettes in his office all day. A computer program in development at Drexel University strips texts of their style. Here, for example, is the original opening paragraph of Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys’ house. The wife had discovered that the husband was carrying on an intrigue with a French girl, who had been a governess in their family, and she had announced to her husband that she could not go on

George Saunders—following in the footsteps of David Foster Wallace, whose 2005 commencement speech to Kenyon College was recently turned into a book—has become the latest author to eternalize his advice to graduates. Random House has announced that it will publish an extended version of the speech he delivered last year at Ithaca’s commencement, titled Congratulations, by the Way, in 2014. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for $250 million—which BusinessInsider says might be “more than four times the price” that the paper is worth. Meanwhile, is the New York Times going to be next? Rumors are flying

Dan Kois’s summer reading At The New Republic, owner Chris Hughes explains why Amazon founder Jeff Bezos wanted to buy the Washington Post, and speculates about what the purchase might mean for the newspaper: “My bet is that the traditional outlets will assimilate some of the business style of their new owners, but the substance of their journalism will remain grounded in their best traditions.” Slate’s Dan Kois attempts to read 23 mass-market paperbacks over a week at the beach. Starting with John Gardner’s Grendel, “the first literary novel [he] ever became obsessed with,” Kois is reading everything from

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon John le Carre recently wrote a piece in the Guardian, taking it to task for failing to offer more protections to leaker Edward Snowden. Now, the paper is taken to le Carre to task. For the next ten days, the Los Angeles Times is “calling all opinionated poets” to contribute poems to their opinion section. While the paper has a policy of not running poetry, on August 25 they’ll make an exception, and will “devote a page of our print section to the best of what comes in.” Daniel Radcliffe, aka Harry Potter, will

J.K. Rowling has accepted damages from a British law firm after one of its lawyers broke a confidentiality agreement and told a friend that Rowling had written a book under the name Robert Galbraith. Upon learning of the pseudonym, the friend tweeted the news to a journalist, outing Rowling and causing Galbraith’s book sales to instantly skyrocket. Rowling was awarded the cost of her legal fees, and the court forced the firm to make a donation to a charity for war veterans. In the New York Times, Tom Hanks explains why he really, really likes vintage manual typewriters. At

Jane Austen bling. Photograph: The Department for Culture, Medi/PA England’s Minister of Culture has barred singer Kelly Clarkson from leaving the country with a ring that once belonged to Jane Austen, claiming that the item is a significant part of England’s cultural history. Clarkson bought the ring at auction last year for over $200,000, and it is one of three existing pieces of jewelry known to have belonged to the writer. A temporary export ban is in place until September 30, and may be extended until the end of the year. Stephen King is not only a brand, but

Young Neil Gaiman Because the target audience for Boris Kachka’s history of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux is, well, people who work in publishing, publisher Simon and Schuster has made it clear that if professional book people want to read Hothouse, they’re going to have to pay for it. In a glossy brochure sent out this week, Simon and Schuster announced that “since your requests for Hothouse have left us (gratefully) overwhelmed, we’ve instituted a No Free Copies policy–even if your name’s in the book.” Westbourne Press, a small publisher based in the UK, is pushing up the publication date