Random House held its first-ever public open house last week. For a twenty-five dollar entrance fee, participants got to listen to editors talk about the making of a bestseller, listen to Kurt Andersen and Emily Bazelon discuss current affairs, and sit in on a panel about giving books as gifts. Did you know Bill Gates has his own book review website? Moby Lives flagged it first, and even after careful scrutiny, we’re still struggling to believe that it’s not a spoof. Jon Cotner, the poet laureate of the stroll and co-author of Ten Walks/Two Talks, has posted a slideshow

The Queen James Bible On Wednesday, New York Public Library president Anthony Marx unveiled plans for the Norman Foster-led redesign of the NYPL flagship branch at Byrant Park. The plan will raise the amount of public space in the library from thirty to seventy percent, and will incorporate additional “light-filled reading areas.” The big downside is that the library will house fewer books: More than three million volumes are being moved off-site, and many writers have protested that they no longer feel welcome to work at the library. “Scholars are people, too, and we are beginning to feel, well,

A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism author Peter Mountford makes a well-reasoned (and predictably unpopular) call for publishing houses to cap advances for “artful literary” books at $50,000. New Yorker book critic James Wood rounds up the highlights of 2012, which include Joshua Cohen’s Four New Messages, Zadie Smith’s NW, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, anthropologist Kirin Narayan’s Alive in the Writing: Crafting Ethnography in the Company of Chekhov. Salman Rushdie was not the only member of the literary elite to be outraged by Mo Yan’s Nobel victory several weeks ago, but he was among the most vocal.

Adam Wilson Emily Gould, the onetime Gawker writer and the author of the essay collection And the Heart Says Whatever, has sold her novel Friendship to Farrar, Straus and Giroux (and specifically to editor Miranda Popkey). According to Gould’s agent, Melissa Flashman, the novel is about “‘an eventful year’ in the lives of two best friends, both 30, who find their friendship is being tested as they get older.” ProPublica rounds up the best reporting on guns from the past several years. Flatscreen author (and Bookforum contributor) Adam Wilson makes The L Magazine’s list of the year’s “Breakout Brooklyn

A film adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children has made it past India’s censorship board without any alterations. “India here we come—intact! Great news,” tweeted the film’s director, Deepa Mehta. “Salman Rushdie and I thrilled.” The film, which debuted at the Toronto Film Festival last September, will be released in India early next year. “Although it is not a popular opinion, I believe that library e-book borrowing erodes ebook sales, at least modestly.” At PWXYZ, Peter Brantley weighs in on the advantages and challenges facing libraries that “lend” e-books. The Algonquin roundtable is gone, Bookstore Row vanished ’80s,

Nan Graham The New York Times is teaming up with Byliner and Vook to publish longform journalism e-books that will run between 10,000 and 20,000 words. The books will be written by Times reporters, and will span culture, science, business, sports, and health topics. The first title, John Branch’s Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek, comes out next week. In related news, Byliner struck a deal with Ingram to release its e-books in print. Editor Nan Graham has been named Scribner’s new publisher. Following Dalkey Archive Press’s remarkable job posting yesterday—which more or less stated that anyone with

Jim Hodges’ special limited edition of Lynne Tillman’s Someday This Will Be Funny In a post on its website, Dalkey Archive Press announced on Wednesday that it has “begun the process of succession” away from being a Champaign, Illinois-based house led by founding publisher John O’Brien to being a press based in London. The site also lists new job openings: The press is seeking an editor, publicist, assistant to the publisher, office manager, web editor, marketing manager, and fundraiser. Dalkey has long been an important press, but be careful to read the fine print before applying: For all these

VS Naipaul: Satish Bate/Hindustan Times Political journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann have signed with Penguin Press to publish a book about the 2012 election, with the working title Double Down: Game Change 2012. (This is not to be confused with their earlier book, Game Change). The book will come out next fall, and has already been optioned for an HBO series. In case they’re in need of an early blurb, here’s one from Bookforum editor Chris Lehmann: “An important addition to the growing list of reasons to pray for the Mayan apocalypse.” At eighty, V.S. Naipaul is as

A young Franz Kafka Simon and Schuster joins HarperCollins and Hachette in dropping protections on its e-book pricing, and working with e-retailers to set prices. Bids are starting at 42,000 euros for a letter in which an especially neurotic Franz Kafka describes his “naked fear” of mice: “it’s certainly related to the unexpected, unwanted, unavoidable, sort of mute, grim, secret-purposeful appearance of these animals, with the feeling that they have dug hundreds of tunnels through the walls around me and are lurking there…” The letter, which was sent to Max Brod, goes on sale this week in Germany. At

Aspiring screenwriter Vladimir Nabokov King Wenclas, the former leader of the Underground Literary Alliance, is gearing up to publish his new book, The McSweeney’s Gang, which is “a satire of today’s literary world.” Wenclas has been an outspoken critic of perennial award-winners and the publshing elite, and his book will feature fictionalized versions of Dave Eggers (whose novel Hologram was just named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times), Vendela Vida, George Saunders, Jennifer Egan, and others. Salman Rushdie has called Chinese writer and Nobel Prize winner Mo Yan a “patsy of the

E.L. James, author of Fifty Shades of Gray and the patron saint of Random House bonuses Thanks to the breakaway success of Fifty Shades of Gray, Random House employees were notified at their holiday party this week that they’ll be getting “5,000 shades of green.” CEO Markus Doyle announced to a cheering crowd Random Housers on Wednesday that every full-time employee who’s been with the company longer than a year will get a $5,000 bonus, while people who have been there less time will get a pro-rated gift. Yes, bedbugs can hide in library books. This week, Hachette kicked

Housing Works, home of the annual Gin Mingle What inspires people to start a literary magazine these days? That’s the question the Observer posed to the editors of the American Reader, which celebrated its first issue last week with a flashy launch party in the West Village. With a masthead featuring Ben Marcus, Dean Young, Jeff Dolven, Scott Hamrah, the magazine, whose editor in chief is the 25-year-old Uzoamaka Maduka, is off to a promising start. Speaking of holiday publishing parties, New York media celebrated itself (and the joys of gin) at the annual Gin Mingle at Housing Works

CreateSpace has announced the 2013 Amazon “Breakthrough Novel” contest. Any unpublished or self-published work of fiction is eligible. The company will start accepting submissions in January, and winners of the Grand Prize and the First Prize will receive, among other things, “a full publishing contract with Amazon Publishing to market and distribute your Manuscript as a published book.” On the occasion of the Oxford American’s 79th issue—and the first edited by new EIC Roger Hodge—Dwight Garner reassesses the magazine’s role over the past twenty years and it’s origins as “The New Yorker with a side of hot sauce, a

Chris Hughes New York Magazine runs a seven-page profile of Chris Hughes, the 29-year-old Facebook co-founder and recently seated owner of the New Republic. While his mission for the magazine isn’t totally clear yet, he does intend to be more hands-on, and to distance himself from his internet roots. “Hughes wants to produce what thoughtful people ought to read,” writes Carl Swanson, “as opposed to churning out what most people like to ‘like.’” Rupert Murdoch’s iPad-only magazine The Daily has folded. Alexis Madrigal speculates about why the virtual general-interest magazine never managed to get off the ground. Is Zoe

A scene from the 1962 newspaper strike Amazon’s Larry Kirshbaum has been promoted to head all of the company’s U.S. publishing endeavors, just as the company prepares to launch a new publishing arm in Europe. The Guardian unveils its list of the year’s top women in publishing, giving props to Hilary Mantel, E.L. James, J.K. Rowling, Amanda Hocking, Julia Donaldson, and Kate Mosse. Nice list, though we have to ask: What about Katherine Boo, Sheila Heti, Lisa Cohen, or Cheryl Strayed? A down-and-out church in Boston is considering selling a first edition of the first book published in America

Andy Greenberg New Yorkers: the first meeting of the Public TransLit Book Club will be held on Dec. 11 at the Lolita Bar on Broome Street. And what’s the TransLit club? It’s a mass-commuter reading group (a variation of Seattle’s Books on the Bus Club) in which participating straphangers read designated books. The inaugural book will be Andy Greenberg’s book on WikiLeaks, This Machine Kills Secrets. Kevin Powers has won the Guardian’s first-book award for Yellow Birds, his novel about a gunner in Iraq. Powers spent two years serving with the army in Iraq, and took the title of

Edgar Allen Poe House The Observer crashes Tao Lin’s graduate seminar on the short story, and gets pretty much what you’d expect: a discussion of George Saunders and casual prescription-drug use. Despite how many books are being published these days, writers and publishers are often bad at promoting them, argues Impossible Mike at HTML Giant. But then, precisely because of the number of books coming out, most forms of advertising don’t seem to work: traditional promotion is often ignored, and social media is overrated. “I’m just wondering,” he writes, “what the hell is the best way to sustainably advertise

Hilary Mantel Simon and Schuster is going to become the first of the Big Six publishers to get into self-publishing. The house announced today that it’s working with the Indiana-based company Author Solutions Inc. to launch a new self-publishing imprint called Archway Publishing. Why do so many great books have bad endings? It could be the need to wind down a plot, a latent conservatism. Or, as Joan Acocella speculates, it could be because the author simply is tired. In an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, Booker Prize winner Hilary Mantel reflects on the status of executions in sixteenth-century

The very, very concise Oxford English Dictionary Peter McCarthy, a former executive for Random House and Penguin, considers the differing cultures of the two houses, and weighs the potential pitfalls of the merger. At The Wall Street Journal, Jami Attenberg—the author of a new novel in which a woman’s obesity “is tearing her family apart”—writes about food in fiction, and wonders: “When does food become more than just the thing your character is putting in her mouth?” Did a former editor of the Oxford English Dictionary secretly remove thousands of words with foreign origins and blame the omissions on

Maurice Sendak is not into the “bullshit of innocence.” Is Amazon quietly marking up the prices of physical books? The New York Times notes that a number of new books that were previously discounted are now being sold at list prices. Before he died, Maurice Sendak spoke with the Believer about publishing houses, “the bullshit of innocence,” and his thoughts on e-books: “I hate them. It’s like making believe there’s another kind of sex. There isn’t another kind of sex. There isn’t another kind of book. A book is a book is a book.” Under a new pilot program,