As part of a project for the Stockholm museum Magasin 3, for the next twenty weeks, anybody can sign up to receive free weekly emails from Miranda July on topics ranging from love to personal finance. Though the emails are sent by July, each contains forwarded messages written by participants (including Catherine Opie, Lena Dunham, and Kareem Abdul-Jabar) to friends and acquaintances, giving the project an intimate and strangely voyeuristic feel. The first installment was sent out on July 1, and it included correspondence between Sheila Heti and Helen Dewitt, and between Etgar Keret and a man known only

A protestor walking towards Tahrir Square in Cairo Random-Penguin, Penguin-House—whatever you want to call it, the merger of two of the world’s biggest publishers is officially complete. The company, headquartered in New York, now employs over 10,000 people and will publish roughly 15,000 books a year across 250 different imprints. Is it still worth a writer’s time to publish in print journals when it’s so easy to post your work online? At HTMLGiant, novelst Shane Jones (Light Boxes) poses the question to “a literary agent at a reputable firm” (who preferred to remain anonymous) and concludes that, contrary to

J.D. Salinger Moby Lives suggests that Barnes and Noble is selling fewer books because they’re stocking fewer books in their stores. Since his death, the big question surrounding J.D. Salinger has been whether he kept writing after he stopped publishing, and, if he did, what that writing was like. When some of Salinger’s letters were exhibited at the Morgan Library recently, Slate’s Ron Rosenbaum noticed something he believes might be a clue about the author’s output during his so-called Silent Years: correspondence between Salinger and his guru, the late Swami Nikhilananda. Social critic and The Pursuit of Loneliness author

Taksim Square Book Club, George Henton/Al Jazeera Inspired by the so-called “standing man” of Istanbul’s Taksim Square protests, a number of Turkish activists have formed the Taksim Square Book Club, a movement in which members stand motionless in the square reading books. According to an Al Jazeera slideshow, Orwell, Kafka, and Camus seem to be the movement’s favored authors. In other Taksim Square news, Can Oz—the head of Turkey’s biggest publishing house, Can Yayinlari—has come out against the government and is now receiving death threats. Though Oz has “long criticized the policies of the Erdogan government… he had never

Shirley Jackson When Shirley Jackson published her short story “The Lottery” in the New Yorker in 1948, the magazine received more mail than it ever had before about a work of fiction. The story, about an unnamed American town that would select one of its residents to be stoned to death each year, also resulted in hundreds of angry letters to Jackson herself, most of which fell into one of three categories: “bewilderment, speculation, and plain old-fashioned abuse.” Was the story meant to be pure fiction, or scathing political critique? To get to the bottom of Jackson’s intentions, her

Big news from the Supreme Court today: In back-to-back rulings on same-sex marriage, judges refused to rule on Proposition 8, California’s ban on gay marriage, clearing the way for gay marriages to resume in the state; and more important, judges ruled 5-4 in favor of extending federal benefits to same-sex couples. That case, which overturned the Defense of Marriage Act, concerned a married gay couple from New York, Edith Windsor and Thea Clara Spyer. After Spyer died in 2008, Windsor inherited both Spyer’s property and a $360,000 tax bill that Windsor would not have had to pay had the couple

The Center for Contemporary Culture in Barcelona has mounted the first-ever retrospective of Chilean author Roberto Bolaño, “Bolaño Archive. 1977–2003,” an exhibition focusing on his time in Barcelona and his final years in the Catalan city of Girona and town of Blanes. The CCCB organized the exhibition in conjunction with Bolaño’s widow, Carolina López, in part to sweep aside the myths that have arisen around Bolaño since his death in 2003 of liver failure (that he was a junkie, an alcoholic, chronically depressed—none of which are true) and to showcase the wealth of manuscripts, letters, and books he left

Carlos Fuentes Newly released intelligence documents reveal that the FBI and State Department monitored renowned Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes for more than two decades because of his friendship with Fidel Castro, and denied him entry to the U.S. on at least two occasions. To help support local bookstores, French culture minister Aurelie Filippetti has proposed banning Amazon from offering free shipping and large discounts in France. While Amazon makes enough to be able to afford to lose money on free shipping, competitors have complained that because of their deals, “the competition is unfair…. No other book retailer, whether a

Filmmaker Sam Taylor-Wood Despite interest from the likes of Gus Van Sant and Bret Easton Ellis, British video artist and filmmaker Sam Taylor-Wood has been selected to direct the film adaptation of Fifty Shades of Gray. Though Taylor-Wood—who, since her marriage, has gone by Taylor-Johnson—has only directed one feature-length film, a biopic about the early years of John Lennon, she is well-known for her photography and video art, which focus on themes of sexuality, death, and madness. In an essay for the New York Times Book Review, Chloe Schama wonders why there are so many exposed female backs on

Protests in Greece after the closure of the ERT, the state-run radio and TV broadcaster. Sopranos creator David Chase once told one of his assistant producers that “I’ll never be truly happy in life . . . until I kill a man . . . not just kill a man, but with my bare hands.” Ken Tucker reviews Brett Martin’s Difficult Men—about the producers of Mad Men, The Wire, and other TV series—in the latest issue of Bookforum. Brazilian academics have applied techniques of analysis devised for studying online social networks to Homer’s Odyssey and found “good evidence that

Audiobook narrator Simon Vance New York mayoral candidate Christine Quinn’s new memoir, With Patience and Fortitude, has sold only about 100 copies in bookstores since it was released on June 11. Palestinian writers Ali Abukhattab and Samah al-Sheikh have been refused Visas to the UK to participate in a two-week festival celebrating contemporary Arabic art. As part of the second annual Shubbak Festival, the couple were supposed to discuss their writing and literature “in the besieged Gaza Strip” at the ICA in London. Palestinian authorities were vague about the reasons for refusing the visas, telling organizers that the festival

In National Geographic, Jonathan Franzen covers the slaughter of migrating songbirds in the Mediterranean. Vice magazine has a reputation for being shameless about their content, but yesterday, the magazine made the rare move of pulling a photo-essay after it inspired a series of outraged responses. The feature, a fashion spread called “Last Words,” re-created the suicides of seven female literary icons: Virginia Woolf, Iris Chang, Dorothy Parker, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sylvia Plath, Sanmao, and Elise Cowen. After being roundly berated, the magazine released a sheepish apology and pulled the feature from their website. The photo spread remains in the

J.D. Salinger Ira Silverberg, the director of literature programs for the National Endowment for the Arts, has announced that he’ll be leaving his position on July 11. Silverberg, who has been an influential publisher (at Grove Press) and a literary agent (at Sterling Lord), says he plans to return to New York. He’ll be temporarily replaced by NEA literature program officer Amy Stolls. Details about Shane Salerno’s forthcoming J.D. Salinger documentary, which has been eight years in the making, have been shrouded in secrecy. The Weinstein Company has now released of the film’s trailer, but don’t watch it hoping

Marie Calloway Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Barton Gellman has signed a deal with Penguin Press to write a book about the expansion of government surveillance programs in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Gellman recently co-authored an article for the Washington Post about the NSA security leak and the existence of a massive internet surveillance program called Prism. Marie Calloway sits down for the Nervous Breakdown’s Six Question Sex Interview and talks about Silvia Federici, childhood masturbation, and the relationship between social anxiety and unfulfilling sex. Neil Gaiman is taking a “sabbatical” from social media. Speaking to the Guardian,

Philipp Meyer’s comic book for the blind After going broke on a previous book tour, Colombian poet Raffael Medina Brochero has offered to sell his testicles for $20,000 to fund a “Poetry for Peace” tour through Europe. Bookforum contributor and newly-minted YA book publisher Lizzie Skurnick has announced the fall list for Lizzie Skurnick Books, which includes re-releases by “Y.A. greats Lois Duncan, M.E. Kerr, Ellen Conford, Lila Perl, Sandra Scoppettone and Berthe Amoss, and MacArthur ‘genius’ award-winner Ernest J. Gaines.” To celebrate the release of Tao Lin’s latest novel—which landed him a five-figure book deal—New York Magazine’s Rachel

Sotheby’s held a literary auction on Tuesday, and a handful of sales exceeded the auction house’s wildest expectations. Among the notable transactions, a first edition of Montaigne’s 1595 collection Les Essays went for $125,000 (it was estimated to sell for between $10,000 and $20,000); a little-known F. Scott Fitzgerald book, Flappers and Philosophers, went for $118,750 (far more than the anticipated $60,000); and a lot that included an early short story and twenty-one letters by David Foster Wallace went for $125,000—well above the predicted $10,000 to $15,000. One of the rare items that didn’t sell was William Faulkner’s Nobel

Lou Li, founder of Qidian “The rich kids have better gas masks”; “pepper spray is good for your skin”: as protesters camp out in Istanbul’s Taksim Square, novelist Elif Shafak heads to Gezi Park to read the revolutionary writing on the walls. “We are entering a new golden age of magazine publishing,” trumpets the summer issue of Port Magazine, though to judge that issue by its cover, very little seems new about either the magazine or our current age of publishing. Of the six editors featured, none are women, and there are only two female contributors in the entire

Judy Blume At the London Review of Books blog, Charles Hartman reflects on what it feels like when a poet discovers that one of his poems has been plagiarized. The Library of Congress is expected to announce this week that Natasha Trethewey will spend another year as the national Poet Laureate. According to the New York Times, in addition to working on a memoir and also serving as the poet laureate of her home state of Mississippi, Trethewey will spend the year travelling around the country and writing “a series of reports exploring societal issues through poetry that are

Ken Burns Philip Gourevitch worked as a bear-skinner, Cynthia Ozick at an accounting firm, and Tobias Wolff as a farmhand—New Yorker contributors reflect on their summer jobs. Kevin Barry has won the International Dublin IMPAC Award for his novel City of Bohane. Barry beat out Michel Houellebecq, Karen Russell, and Haruki Murakami for the $130,000 prize. Documentarian Ken Burns has announced that he is going to film a six-hour adaptation of Siddhartha Mukherjee’s book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. Burns was inspired to do the project by the memory of his mother, who died of

Library in Istanbul’s Gezi Park Taking a cue from Occupy Wall Street, more than fifteen Turkish publishers (including Sel Publishing House, which has previously faced obscenity charges for publishing books by William Burroughs) have stepped up to donate books to an impromptu library that’s being assembled in Gezi Park—the site of Turkey’s peaceful anti-government protests. The manuscript of Samuel Beckett’s novel Murphy has only been seen by several people other than the author himself, but it’s expected to sell for over a million dollars when it goes up for auction next month. In addition to notes and “extensive corrections,”