New Yorkers: If you’re free tonight, the New School is hosting what promises to be an excellent panel about “the cultural phenomenon of the middlebrow.” The event features critics (and Bookforum contributors) Ruth Franklin, Christopher Beha, and Christine Smallwood, as well as New York Times Book Review editor Jennifer Szalai. Thanks to a Supreme Court ruling, an international war over copyright and the right to resell books may have just been averted. In a 6-3 decision on Tuesday, the court determined that a Thai student who had been legally buying cheap copies of American textbooks in Thailand then selling

Steve Coll Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, New America Foundation head, and New Yorker staffer Steve Coll, whose latest book is Private Empire: ExxonMobil and Amercan Power, is replacing Nicholas Lehmann as the Dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. Obama still has four years to go on his term, but Chicago and Hawaii have already been vetted as acceptable locations for a future Obama presidential library. Harper’s has revived its dormant Folio section with an excerpt from spy novelist John le Carré’s forthcoming novel, A Delicate Truth. n+1 editor Keith Gessen shares his generally positive thoughts on Dave Eggers

Amazon has launched a new imprint for literary fiction called “Little a,” which is kicking off with a logo designed by Chip Kidd, and fiction by A.L. Kennedy, James Franco, and Bookforum contributor Jenny Davidson. What exactly is Anne Carson? The New York Times Magazine profiles the hard-to-classify writer in the most intimate way she’ll allow: through email. Sam Anderson writes: “As an e-mail correspondent, Carson was prompt and friendly but slightly unorthodox. She wrote almost entirely in lowercase letters. Her punctuation was irregular. Some questions she answered with several hundred words, others with only one or two (‘no

Marilyn Monroe, photo by John Florea Zach Seward explains how Google Reader helps Iranians get around censorship—and why the service’s demise will be catastrophic for reading in Iran. Don’t date an intern, don’t tell other journalists about your relationship, and don’t get involved with somebody working your beat—Ann Friedman lays out the rules for journalists dating other journalists. A new literary prize is born: In an announcement this week at the British Library, the UK-based Folio Society broke the news that it would sponsor the Literature Prize, a new $60,000 award dedicated to celebrating “the best English-language fiction from

Barbara Kingsolver, one of the finalists for the Women’s Prize for Fiction The longlist for the Women’s Fiction Prize (formerly the Orange Fiction Prize) was released this week, and Hilary Mantel, Zadie Smith, Sheila Heti, and Barbara Kingsolver are contenders for the $45,000 prize. The winner will be announced in June. Given how many enemies Amazon has, why does it now have the best reputation of any U.S. company? News Corp says that it’s going to pump $2.6 billion into its new publishing arm, which includes more than 170 newspapers, such as the Wall Street Journal and the New

An architectural mock-up for Rem Koolhaas’s National Library in Qatar Nick Yarris, a former death row inmate who was exonerated after 21 years in solitary confinement, has filed suit against HarperCollins for yanking his life story, Seven Days to Live, off shelves after he was arrested again for growing marijuana. He’s suing the publisher for breach of contract, and trying to get the book back into print. Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of the Great Gatsby, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan, will open the Cannes Film Festival on May 15. When individuals escape from a fundamentalist religion or cult and

Kenneth Goldsmith How many copies need to be sold before a book qualifies as an Amazon “bestseller”? Amazon won’t say, but Publisher’s Weekly did their own calculations and figured out that “a title in Amazon’s top five averages 1,050 print copies sold across all channels, including other retailers, on a typical day. And because the general industry thinking is that Amazon accounts for about 30% of print sales, that means it likely takes around 300 copies per day to reach Amazon’s top five, depending on the day of the week and the time of year.” “Should people be writing

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s wife, Anna. The Slate Book Review’s Dan Kois breaks down how he calculates how much to pay writers. Among more predictable factors (“how much I love or think I will love the piece,” “how little I think I can get away with paying”) is an especially interesting one: “whether the writer has friends who I have also assigned pieces to who might tell her how much I paid them.” Melville House executive editor Kelly Burdick makes the point that “it makes me think that we’ve all discounted gossip as a reliable threat for underpayment.” Meanwhile, at the

Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes. Are literary novelists too embarrassed by the prospect of writing seriously about sex to give it a real shot? Not only does Amazon want to be the world’s biggest book retailer, it also wants to control the .book internet domain. The Association of American Publishers took Amazon to task for the move in a letter to ICANN, the organization that oversees the distribution of internet domain names. In the letter, a lawyer for the AAP protested the application, concluding, “in short, Amazon makes clear that it seeks exclusive control of the “.book” string solely

Michelle Orange Where are all the great female cultural critics? The Slate Book Review considers the question in light of Michelle Orange’s new essay collection. Julian Barnes ruffled feathers among this British literati this week by claiming that compared to their foreign counterparts, Brits are especially bad at writing about sex. Since the ban was lifted on Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover, Barnes says that there’s “not just a writerly desire, but a commercial obligation to write in a detailed way about sex.” And that, he continues, has created its own set of problems: “Sometimes all that happened was that

Banker-turned-novelist Amish Tripathi has scored an unprecedented $1 million advance from an Indian publisher for his forthcoming trilogy. The Guardian explains: “Tripathi is one of a new wave of writers selling huge quantities of books which mix reimagined ancient Hindu myths, history, narrative and spiritual wisdom [to] retell stories often drawn from the everyday experiences of middle-class Indian youth in simple language.” Citing financial pressures, the Washington Post has announced that starting next Monday, it will begin running sponsored content on its website. Ponyter wryly notes that “the challenges related to publishing sponsored content would almost certainly be a

New Yorkers: If you’re free tonight, check out the fourth Double Take reading series, organized by Bookforum’s own Albert Mobilio. The event asks three pairs of writers to read original writing about shared experiences. Tonight’s event will see Rick Moody and Tim Davis singing about the dinner where they met, John Yau and Eugene Lim remembering Robert Creeley’s memorial service, and Charles Bernstein and Elizabeth Willis discussing “the obvious.” VIDA has released its annual count of reviewer gender ratios in publications ranging from the New Yorker to the Boston Review (sadly, Bookforum was not included). While the numbers remain

After a year marred by plagiarism scandals that led him to give up his staff position at the New Yorker, Jonah Lehrer is facing more bad news: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has announced that, “after an internal review uncovered significant problems” with Lehrer’s second book,How We Decide, it will pull the book from shelves. HMH has “no plans to reissue it in the future,” and will offer refunds to people who already purchased the book. By looking at mutations in language like they do mutations in genes, geneticists have roughly estimated that Homer composed the Iliad in “762 B.C., give

NBCC winner Leanne Shapton The National Book Critics Circle has announced the winners for the best books of 2012. They are as follows: in the fiction category, Ben Fountain for Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk; in nonfiction, Andrew Solomon for Far From the Tree; in autobiography, Leanne Shapton for Swimming Studies; in criticism, Marina Warner for Stranger Magic; in biography, Robert Caro for The Passage of Power, and in poetry, D.A. Powell for Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys. Barnes and Noble says it has no plans to speed up its store closings over the next ten years,

Benjamin Moser Benjamin Moser has signed on to write the first authorized biography of Susan Sontag, who died eight years ago at the age of 71. Moser agreed to the project after being approached by Sontag’s son, David Rieff, and literary agent Andrew Wylie. He is the author of Why This World, a biography of Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector (if you’re unfamiliar, read Rachel Kushner’s essay on her fiction) and expects that he’ll finish the book in three to four years. Bret Easton Ellis explains why, after years of having no interest whatsoever in writing fiction, he “began making

John Ashbery For your John Ashbery fix, PennSound has posted new videos and audio recordings of the poet’s recent readings. David Mitchell and his wife Keiko Yoshida are currently translating the memoir of a severely autistic Japanese boy, the Cloud Atlas author tells the Guardian. Naoki Higashida “tapped out the memoir letter by letter on an alphabet grid on a piece of cardboard” when he was only 13. The couple initially began translating the 2006 memoir for their own purposes—their son is autistic—when they realized it might have a wider appeal. “If I have any influence in the public

Chris Hayes After publicly supporting GOProud, a group of gay Republicans, the liberal MSNBC host and author Chris Hayes has found some unlikely allies, including Daniel Foster of the conservative magazine National Review. “Though I don’t agree with Hayes on much,” Foster writes, “he’s right on this one.” “It did not feel like Seth MacFarlane was hosting the entertainment world’s most prestigious event, but an Oscar party for his bros in his parents’ basement.” Elissa Schappell, author of the story collection Blueprints for Better Girls, was not amused by the “vile jokes” of the 85th annual Oscars. (Speaking of

Poet Simon Armitage The finalists for the 33rd annual Los Angeles Book Prize were announced last week, and the winners will be awarded on Thursday. In addition to selecting winners in the usual categories, Kevin Starr and Margaret Atwood will be presented with special achievement awards. In the spirit of Sebald, poet Simon Armitage will attempt to walk all 260 miles of England’s coast this summer with nothing but poems to trade for food and shelter. Javier Marias’s “introduction to professional writing was facilitated by an uncle who was a maker of soft porn and horror films. During the

Sam Lipsyte Bill O’Reilly, the Fox News anchor who has written bestselling books about the killing of two presidents (Lincoln and Kennedy), is now working on a book about the killing of Jesus, to be published by Macmillan. “Killing Jesus will tell the story of Jesus of Nazareth as a beloved and controversial young revolutionary brutally killed by Roman soldiers. O’Reilly will recount the seismic political and historical events that made his death inevitable, and the changes his life brought upon the world for the centuries to follow.” This week, the New York Times ran an article claiming that

Three independent bookstores in New York and South Carolina have filed suit against Amazon and the “Big Six” publishers for allegedly violating antitrust agreements by making it difficult for smaller publishers to break into the e-book market. Debut novelist and recent Iowa Writer’s Workshop grad Erika Johansen has landed a seven-figure book deal for “Queen of the Tearling, a fantasy trilogy inspired in part by Barack Obama.” In a new foreword to Orlando, Jeanette Winterson sings the praises of Virginia Woolf’s shape-shifting novel. The book “refuses all constraints: historical, fantastical, metaphysical, sociological. Ageing is irrelevant. Gender is irrelevant. Time