Ramdasha Bikceem’s “Gunk 4”; from the Riot Grrrl Collection, edited by Lisa Darms Publishing Perspectives profiles South Korea’s Paju Bookcity—a 24-year-old, 10,000-person town near the border of South Korea that’s inhabited almost exclusively by book-industry employees. “It is as if the book trade has been reduced to a giant board game, laid out on quiet, tree-lined streets, interspersed with wooden benches. It is also a little like walking around a book kibbutz.” Mary Gaitskill talks with Slant about the contemporary obsession with moms, the ascent of internet porn, and her forthcoming novel, which is “about a young girl learning

Gary Shteyngart in his Google Glass, for The New Yorker Amazon and Overstock.com fell into a pricing war last Thursday after Overstock ran an ad campaign announcing that it would mark all book prices down ten percent lower than Amazon’s for one week only. Not to be outdone, Amazon then knocked down its book prices, in some cases as much as 50 to 65 percent. As the Christian Science Monitor observes, “it’s only the latest skirmish in the drama that has become the e-book pricing wars.” At the New Yorker, Gary Shteyngart gets to take Google Glass out for

Giorgio Agamben in Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew. Lydia Davis, Jonathan Franzen, Paul Harding, and Justin Torres share their favorite opening lines of novels. Contrary to Wall Street expectations, Amazon came up short on predicted second-quarter earnings last week, making $7 million less than the quarter before. But Jeff Bezos isn’t concerned. As Forbes reports, though there was a small dip in Amazon’s stock, “this kind of thing isn’t unusual for Amazon, as the company’s margins tend to be razor-thin.” In honor of the centenary of Roald Dahl’s birth in 2016 (the author died in 1990) UK

Mispronouncing “Ben-ya-meen”: One of Buzzfeed’s comp lit fails. MIT and JSTOR have convinced a federal court to delay the release of 8,000 Secret Service documents detailing the investigation that led to criminal charges against the late internet activist Aaron Swartz. The first batch of documents were supposed to be released on July 20, but thanks to the motion, they’re now expected to be ready in late August. Both organizations say that they need more time to redact the names of employees and descriptions of their computer networks. A U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., approved the release of the

If the phrases “d’you think,” “panting slightly,” and “strode back” all appear in a novel by an author you’ve never heard of, there’s a chance J.K. Rowling wrote the book. At Yahoo, Chris Wilson locates the “15 stylistic fingerprints that link The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith to four novels by J. K. Rowling.” During a meeting with his lawyer in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport on Wednesday, Edward Snowden was given a change of clothes and some reading material. In additional to several shirts and a new pair of jeans, Antatoly Kucherena brought Snowden a copy of Crime and Punishment.

Skylight Books owner Jeffrey Tambor Back in the early days of his career, while working as an in-house reader at publisher Jonathan Cape, James Lasdun passed on a novel by an unknown author named “Jane Somers.” Unfortunately for him, “Jane Somers” turned out to be Doris Lessing, and the incident was quickly turned into a cautionary tale for publishers, and a major embarrassment for Lasdun. After decades of avoiding Lessing’s writing, Lasdun recounts how the incident has haunted him through the years—and how he has finally come around to reading her. According to the New Republic, the literary equivalent

Norman Mailer’s house FSG’s Work in Progress blog has asked six Farrar, Straus, and Giroux authors—Frank Bidart, Nicola Griffith, Jesse Bering, Maureen McLane, Carle Phillips, and Chris Adrian—”what books spoke to them when they were coming out.” The answers are fantastic, and so is the Frank Bidart poem “Queer,” printed here in full. (Related: Bidart, whose author photo was apparently taken by James Franco, is reviewed at Bookforum.com here.) The news that Lonely Planet is laying off more than a third of its editorial staff has led to a sad but kind of cool new Twitter hashtag, #lpmemories. Current

Courtesy of the Malcolm Gladwell Book Generator Could Amazon become the victim of its own success? At Salon, Evan Hughes argues that if the internet behemoth puts bookstore chains out of business, then readers will have a hard time learning about new books. Hughes points out that surveys indicate that “roughly 60 percent of book sales—print and digital—now occur online. But buyers first discover their books online only about 17 percent of the time. Internet booksellers specifically, including Amazon, account for just 6 percent of discoveries. Where do readers learn about the titles they end up adding to the

Chocolate: The key to reviving in-store book sales. Glenn Greenwald, the Brazil-based Guardian journalist who has been working with Edward Snowden and report on the NSA security leaks, just signed a deal with Metropolitan to write a book about about NSA surveillance. The book, which is slated to come out in March 2014, will “contain new revelations exposing the extraordinary cooperation of private industry and the far-reaching consequences of the government’s program, both domestically and abroad.” Researchers in Belgium have discovered that infusing bookstores with a subtle smell of chocolate encourages shoppers to stick around longer. Specifically, “customers were

A Zadie Smith-approved photo of London As the publishing world reels from the fact that J.K. Rowling published a book under a male pseudonym, Flavorwire’s Jason Diamond reminds us that Don DeLillo also did a little gender-bending with Amazons, a book about hockey he wrote under the name Cleo Birdwell. (For more on that, read Gerald Howard’s Bookforum piece on the novel). Rolling Stone courted controversy this week by publishing an issue with Boston Marathon bomber Dzhohkar Tsarnaev on the cover looking rumpled and Jim Morrison-esque. The cover was immediately denounced by the media—and by CVS, which has refused

David Rakoff David Rakoff’s posthumous book Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish will be released this month, less than a year after his death last August. The New York Times remembers the late essayist, and offers an early look at the novel, which “spans decades, from turn-of-the-20th-century Chicago to midcentury Manhattan to San Francisco at the height of the AIDS crisis, and then to the near-present, when a grief-stricken man opens a wrapped box from long ago, and all the years—with the longings and indignities and small, eventful generosities they contain—collapse into a single moment.” The U.S. government has

Update: “Zimmerman Juror Drops Her Plans to Write Book.”

Michel Houellebecq It’s been less than a week since George Zimmerman was acquitted for the murder of Trayvon Martin, but one of the jurors on the case is already angling for a book deal. Galleycat reports that Juror B37 has teamed up with Martin Literary Agency to explain “why the jurors had no option but to find Zimmerman Not Guilty due to the manner in which he was charged and the content of the jury instructions.” The real name of Juror B37 has not been released, but Gawker has posted the courtroom interviews conducted with the woman prior to

JK Rowling, aka Robert Galbraith Amazon has announced that it will be launching a new imprint dedicated exclusively to comic books and graphic novels. Jet City Comics will debut this fall with Christian Cameron and Dmitry Bondarenko’s Symposium, and will be followed by an adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s story “The Meathouse Man” and the sci-fi novel Wool. It took less than a year for Arthur Frommer, the 83-year-old creator of the Frommer’s travel guides, to buy his company back after selling it to Google last year. The former G.I. isn’t wasting any more time: he plans to release

Geoff Dyer’s preferred work chair. The PEN American Center has announced its shortlist for its 2013 literary awards. This year, the Center will award nearly $150,000 to writers, editors and translators through sixteen different awards and fellowships. A partial list of the finalists: Wiley Cash, Sergio de la Pava, Jac Jemc, Lucila Perillo, and Claire Vaye Watkins made the shortlist for the best debut novel award; Katherine Boo, Donovan Hohn, Victoria Sweet, and Anne Applebaum are up for the nonfiction book prize; and Robert Hass, Jill Lepore, and Daniel Mendelsohn are competing for the award for best essay collection.

A page from the manuscript of Samuel Beckett’s Murphy A six-notebook draft of Murphy, Samuel Beckett’s first novel, has sold at auction for nearly a million pounds. Up until its sale to Reading University this week, the manuscript belonged to a private collector and had been shrouded in secrecy. According to the Guardian, “the manuscript has rarely been seen since Beckett gave it to his friend Brian Coffey in 1938 to thank him for his support after the writer was stabbed in a random attack by a pimp in a Paris street as he was revising the proofs.” At

304. Apple conspired to raise e-book prices, federal judge rules [AND] A judge says Apple fixed e-book prices. This chart shows how they did it

Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche The New Republic’s Isaac Chotiner picks a with fight with Americanah author Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche by dubbing her an “insufferable interviewee.” Guillermo del Toro is in talks with Charlie Kaufman about writing the screenplay for the directors upcoming adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. As del Toro told the Daily Telegraph, “Charlie [Kaufman] and I talked for about an hour-and-a-half and came up with a perfect way of doing the book. I love the idea of the Trafalmadorians [the aliens of Slaughterhouse-Five]—to be ‘unstuck in time.’” At Flavorwire, Jason Diamond evaluates the growing genre of “Brooklynsploitation”—novels that

Christian Marclay’s “The Clock” The Guardian has attempted to create a literary version of Christian Marclay’s incredible artwork “The Clock.” Marclay’s artwork consists of film clips featuring shots of clocks that are spliced into a 24-hour chronological loop and synched to real time, and the Guardian’s literary clock will do the same thing with text. For example, they’re looking for sentences like this one from Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: “’It was 12:56 A.M. when Gerald drove up onto the grass and pulled the limousine right next to the cemetery.” They’re still accepting submissions of quotes,

Neil Gaiman In the smartest response we’ve read to Mark Edmundson’s screed against the state of contemporary poetry in Harper’s, Stephen Burt puts Edmundson’s critique into historical context—“complaints against contemporary poetry arise, like vampire slayers, in every generation”—and addresses his concerns point by point. While conceding that “some American poets today are indeed, as Edmundson complains, difficult, idiosyncratic, private, learned, or just weird,” Burt also makes a convincing case that there are many poets today working towards Edmundson’s ideal: “a clearer and a more public contemporary poetry.” At the New Statesman, Laurie Penny examines her history as a “manic