Fran Lebowitz Fran Lebowitz might be getting her own HBO talk show. Wayne Koestenbaum is a cultural critic, poet, novelist, and Bookforum contributor. And now we can add “painter” to that list. This month, the New York gallery White Columns will show about fifty of Koestenbaum’s artworks, including “some brightly colored self-portraits and a smattering of male nudes.” Speaking to the Observer, Koestenbaum said he paints “in the |“I am nervous about showing the work publicly,” Mr. Koestenbaum admitted. “I’m also entirely ecstatic.|mood| of Joe Brainard or John Wesley, but with the procedure and crazy intensity of obsessive repeaters

From James Greer’s tour diary with Guided by Voices At the New Yorker’s Page Turner blog, legendary publisher Robert Gottlieb predicts upcoming plot twists on Girls by re-reading bestsellers from the ’60s: “We don’t know yet how things will work out for the girls of Girls … but if it follows tradition, at least one of them will rise to the professional top, having sacrificed True Love; one will marry the nice guy next door and settle down to domestic contentment, if not bliss; and the one who Went Bad will die tragically—in the old days, of alcohol or

Following the disclosure by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency of the full gamut of drug-abuse charges against cyclist Lance Armstrong, a bookstore in Glasgow has elected to reshelve his memoir, Every Second Counts, in their fiction section. Moby Lives is calling upon other bookstores to do the same. How a book of lectures about the Industrial Revolution became the inspiration for the Opening Ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games: screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce tells the Telegraph about how “its most striking images—an industrial powerhouse rising before your eyes, a green hill disgorging workers into the arena, rings forged in molten

RIP, Newsweek print edition. If you missed our panel at the New School on Monday—the one with Lynne Tillman, Sheila Heti, Émilie Notéris, and Wendy Delorme, and Chris Kraus—you can read all about it at Capital New York. In spite of all the muscle they’ve put behind their publishing imprint, Amazon is having a tough time getting their books on bestseller lists. Amazon’s big fall release, a memoir by actress Penny Marshall, sold only seven thousand copies during its first four weeks of sales—in part because it wasn’t stocked in any Barnes and Noble stores, or any big-box chains.

In response to Johnny Depp’s new line of books, Laura Miller asks: Are boutique publishing imprints for celebrities going to be the literary equivalent of endorsing a fragrance? After accepting her second Booker Prize on Tuesday, Hilary Mantel announced that her novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies are not only serving as the inspiration for a six-part BBC series, but are also being adapted for the stage. Chuck Wendig offers some tips about how “not to suck” at a writers’ conference. Along with the thousands of publishers, writers, and literary agents that turned up for last week’s

Hilary Mantel Hilary Mantel has become the first woman to win the Man Booker Prize twice. Mantel was awarded the Booker on Tuesday for Bring Up the Bodies, the second installment in her trilogy on Thomas Cromwell, and the sequel to her novel Wolf Hall, which won the Booker in 2009. The only other authors to win the award twice are J.M. Coetzee and Peter Carey. Despite his near-rock-star popularity outside of Japan, Haruki Murakami has delivered only one reading in his home country. He doesn’t do TV or radio interviews there, and he won’t appear on the cover

The young Franz Kafka A suitcase full of tens of thousands of previously unpublished documents by Franz Kafka might soon be made public, thanks to a recent ruling by a Tel Aviv judge. The papers—which include Kafka’s notebooks and letters—have been under dispute since the death of their final owner in 2007. Kafka left the papers to his executor after his death in 1924, and in 1939, Max Brod transported them to Palestine, where he left them to his secretary, who bequeathed them to her daughters. Despite protests from the daughters, this week’s ruling was made on the grounds

Kingsley Amis New Yorkers: What are you doing tonight? It can’t be better than coming to the event we’re co-hosting! “The Naked Truth,” a panel on female sexuality in fiction, will feature Lynne Tillman, Chris Kraus, Emilie Noteris, and Wendy Delorme, and be moderated by How Should a Person Be? author Sheila Heti. The panel will be held at the New School as part of the Villet Gillet’s Walls and Bridges series, and more details are available here. None other than Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has confirmed that Kindles still aren’t making the company any money, though they are

The publishing map of the world A bestselling thriller writer slash marketing executive sits down to crunch the numbers on Lena Dunham’s $3.7 million book advance, and concludes that in terms of how much Dunham might actually earn, the deal is not as crazy as it’s been made out to be. “Underwear is definitely pants.” So starts novelist Alexander Chee’s “21 Lies Writers Tell Themselves (and How They Can Stop Lying to Themselves and Become Awesome!) Here is a map of the world adjusted to the size of book publishing markets. At the New York Times Opinionator blog, Catherine

Denis Johnson Defying Ladbroke’s predictions of a Murakami victory, Chinese novelist Mo Yan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday. Mo (a pen name that means “don’t speak”) is the author of six novels that have been translated into English, as well as multiple short story collections. In grantating the prize to Mo, the Swedish Academy described him as a writer “who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history, and the contemporary.” Artist Ai Weiwei, however, did not agree: “Giving the award to a writer like this is an insult to humanity and to literature. It’s shameful

Philip Larkin Three pairs of Philip Larkin’s eyeglasses are now on display at a British eye clinic. “I wouldn’t say Philip Larkin himself would be quite so chuffed with being associated with the National Health Services,” quipped one local politician. “He was a hypochondriac.” The Massachusetts-based Paris Press has announced plans to re-release Virginia Woolf’s 64-page essay “On Being Ill,” which considers illness, alongside “love, battle, and jealousy [as one of] the prime themes of literature.” The essay will be run alongside “Notes from Sick Rooms,” an essay by Woolf’s mother, Julia Stephen, and will be released this November.

Soon-to-be-memoirist John Cleese. Lena Dunham’s forthcoming advice book, Not That Kind of Girl, has sold for $3.7 million to Random House. In addition to chapters on love, friendship, and work, the book will also include “an account of some radically and hilariously inappropriate ways I have been treated at work/by professionals because of my age and gender.” Riot Grrrl fans and library nerds take note: for their October issue, The Believer asked Lisa Darms, a senior archivist at NYU’s Fales Library, to curate a selection of her favorite documents and ephemera from the library’s Riot Grrrl collection. The good

Margaret Atwood At Slate, Noah Gallagher Shannon dives into the Cormac McCarthy archives, turning up letters, an early draft of Blood Meridian, and a recipe for gunpowder. Take a pencil (make that two) on the airplane. Also, do back exercises: Margaret Atwood offers up ten rules for writers. (Plus more from Zadie Smith.) The Guardian’s poetry doctor is in: Tell William Sieghart what ails you, and the Forward Prize-winning poet will prescribe you a lyrical cure. Justin Cronin is an Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate, PEN/Hemingway Award-winner, and all-around literary guy who just happened to get swept up in the

An e-book scanner After seven years of litigation, Google and the Association of American Publishers have settled the dispute over Google’s practice of scanning books, and both sides are agreeing to play nice. According to Publishers Weekly, Google will “acknowledge the rights and interests of copyright-holders,” while U.S. publishers can “choose to make available or choose to remove their books and journals digitized by Google for its Library Project.” Because the settlement is private, few of the conditions were made public. But some experts suspect that much more happened behind closed doors than either side is willing to let

Truman Capote Communist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who died this week, has a new book coming out this spring. Publisher Little, Brown says that Hobsbawm turned in the manuscript for his final book three months ago, and that Fractured Spring will be released in March. The book is about “the history of the ‘classical’ arts and culture in the 19th and 20th centuries… taking in subjects as diverse as religion, manifestos and the myth of the American cowboy.” Amazon is not only publishing books, it’s now optioning them, too. The company announced on Wednesday that Amazon Studios (which we were

Lena Dunham Lena Dunham is shopping around a book proposal, and word has it that the manuscript isn’t going to go for any less than a cool million. According to a leaked email from her literary agent, the Girls creator is currently taking bids on the book, and will stop accepting publishing house suitors by the end of the day on Wednesday. The book is titledNot That Kind of Girl: Advice by Lena Dunham, and according to David Haglund at Slate, will include chapters on “losing her virginity, trying to eat well (detailed diet journal included), obsessing about death,

Eric Hobsbawm Historian Eric J. Hobsbawm died at his home in London on Monday at the age of 95. A renowned historian, Hobsbawm was the author of several volumes on what he called “the long 19th century”: The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848, The Age of Capital: 1848-1875, and The Age of Empire: 1874-1914. Hobsbawm became a dedicated Communist while in Germany during the waning days of the Weimar Republic (he was kicked out of the country for passing out party fliers after Hitler’s rise to power) and went on to do academic work in 19th-century labor movements, as well

Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Norton editor Matt Weiland has purchased Blake Bailey’s forthcoming biography of Philip Roth, which is tentatively titled Philip Roth: The Biography. Roth has granted Bailey full access to his archives and papers, and has already sat for a series of interviews. This isn’t the only project that Bailey is working on, either: Weiland recently purchased Bailey’s memoir, The Splendid Things We Planned, and it’s set to come out with Norton in 2014. Last month, the New York Times called attention to the growing industry of pay-for-play book reviews (a phenomenon that’s also been called “sock puppetry”)

Graphic novelist Daniel Clowes Early reviews of J.K. Rowling’s first adult novel are starting to come in, and they’re not good. Meanwhile, over at Amazon, customer reviews were wildly mixed, even though many reviewers admitted tonot having read the book. A new study finds that 55 percent of books labeled Young Adult are actually purchased and read by people over eighteen. And these readers aren’t just people in their early twenties, either—a full 28 percent of all YA books were sold to people between the ages of thirty and forty-four. To launch his novel Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, Robin

That charming man: Morrissey. The Penguin Group has filed suit against writers Elizabeth Wurtzel, Ana Marie Cox, Rebecca Mead, “Hip-Hop Minister” Conrad Tillard, and Holocaust survivor Herman Rosenblat to recoup tens of thousands of dollars (up to $81,000, in one case) spent on book advances (and interest) for manuscripts that were never turned in. n+1 has posted an impressive remembrance of Shulamith Firestone, the author of The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, with testimonies from Kate Millet, Chris Kraus, Nina Power, and others. Could book bloggers be hurting literature? Peter Stothard, a Booker Prize judge, says