Tom Sawyer, from smithsonian.com At the New Yorker’s Page Turner blog, Christine Smallwood reflects on Norman Mailer’s brief career as an auteur (he specialized in films that “that bartenders play on silent to create ambiance”) and what it suggests about his fiction. The real-life inspiration for Tom Sawyer: a hard-drinking, Brooklyn-born, volunteer firefighter. Is former New Yorker journalist Jonah Lehrer angling for a book deal about his fall from grace? That’s what it sounds like according to an essay in Los Angeles Magazine. “I’m extremely tempted to correct many of the false accusations that have been made about my

The MTA’s Kindle collection Digital Book World asks: “Can you go to jail for writing a fake book review?” Okay, we know everybody is sick of hearing all about Naomi Wolf’s Vagina, but you should still make time for the Millions’ “feminist hate-read book club” on the topic. And while you’re at it, check out Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s takedown of Vagina from our current issue. Anybody want to buy Tao Lin’s juicer, bed frame, or MacBook? The novelist is running low on cash (he’s awaiting a paycheck from Sarah Lawrence College) and is hoping to make ends meet by selling

The owners of Village Voice Media are selling all their publications, which include The Village Voice, SF Weekly, the LA Weekly, among others.

David Markson Among the things we learned about J.K. Rowling from reading the New Yorker profile of her in this week’s issue are that: she’s worth nine hundred million dollars, she worked for Amnesty International, and is “shy and thin-skinned.” Also, the reason she’s venturing into adult fiction is because “there are certain things you just don’t do in fantasy. You don’t have sex near unicorns. It’s an ironclad rule. It’s tacky.” The first issue of Huffington, the Huffington Post’s new weekly iPad only magazine, is dedicated to literature, and features poetry and fiction by Aimee Bender, John Matthias

The Brooklyn Book Festival is this Sunday, and like the run-up to the presidential election, it only seems to get bigger every time it comes around. We’ve sifted through the day’s events (all eighty-plus of them) to choose our favorites. If you can only make it to one panel, it should be Bookforum editor Michael Miller talking to LRB editor Christian Lorentzen and novelists Elissa Schappell and Clancy Martin about money in fiction. A full list of events is available here, and our staff picks are below.

New Yorkers: If you’re not already enrolled in an institution of higher learning (or even if you are) we encourage you to check out the course listings on offer from the Brooklyn Institute. The Institute was started in 2011 as a way of taking liberal arts courses out of the classroom—many of their seminars are conducted in the back room of a Boerum Hill restaurant—and span subjects from Spinoza to Freud to realism in literature. This Fall, they’re offering classes on the history, theory, and literature of zombies (“‘Zombi’ and the Politics of Representation”), a survey on the role of

Anatole Broyard Two weeks ago, Philip Roth took Wikipedia to task in an open letter on the New Yorker’s website for not letting him correct an error in a entry about one of his novels. The alleged error was about the inspiration for The Human Stain, which Roth claims—contrary to Wikipedia—was not based on editor Anatole Broyard. But in another open letter posted on Facebook, Broyard’s daughter responded to Roth, noting that “there was a legitimate reason that many reviewers of the book and movie drew the comparison to my dad’s life.” She added, “I don’t think it’s reasonable

Bob Dylan In response to protests from writers, artists and scholars, the New York Public Library has altered plans on the $300 million renovation of the flagship Fifth Avenue branch. Rather than move millions of volumes into the library into off-site storage in New Jersey, an $8 million donation has made it possible to build enough storage space in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building to keep 3.3 of the library’s 4.5 million books in the building, the New York Times reported on Wednesday. Film producer Scott Rudin, publishing veteran Frances Coady, and IAC chairman Barry Diller have formed a

Molly Ringwald A new report by Gartner Research predicts that 10 to 15 percent of all ratings and reviews generated through social media will be fake by 2014—they’ll be written either by the author or somebody with a vested interest in the success of the product. So perhaps this is a good time to pay attention to Galleycat’s roundup of the top customer reviewers on Amazon. Just in time for the publication of Salman Rushdie’s memoir, Joseph Anton, a radical Iranian organization has raised the bounty on Rushdie’s head from $500,000 to $3.3 million. When reached for comment, Rushdie

David Byrne Here’s an interview with Lauren Cerand, identified by the Rumpus, Flavorwire, and The Millions as a “need-to-know freelance literary publicist.” In a tell-all that will be published this week, Joyce Johnson, one of Jack Kerouac’s exes, reminisces about what it was like to date the famously drunk, famously prolific author of On the Road. Among the juicier details to emerge from the book is that, contrary to Kerouac’s claim that he wrote On the Road in a “blast of energy during three weeks in 1951,” the writer actually spent years working on and revising the novel. Salon

Last year, editor and novelist Keith Gessen was arrested at an Occupy Wall Street protest and spent some time in jail. Today, as protests marking OWS’s one-year anniversary roil Wall Street (so far, more than 100 people have been arrested), a concerned citizen asks Gessen how much the arrest cost him. Turns out he paid a $120 fine, got a parking ticket, and his bike was stolen. All told, that cost him about $250—kind of a lot if you’re living on a writer’s wages.

Claude McKay A San Francisco literary agent says she plans to be more careful about her use of social media—and especially about how much she announces her location—after she was violently attacked last week by an author whose manuscript she rejected. n+1 editor Marco Roth talks to the Observer about his forthcoming memoir, and about how an investigation into his father’s death led him back through the canon of classic novels that his father made him read as a teenager. For the next 135 days, a star-studded cast that includes Tilda Swinton, Will Self, and David Cameron will be

We enjoyed this profile of poet and critic Stephen Burt (Close Calls with Nonsense), who is not only “heir to the intellectual mantle long held by giants like Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler” but an “unabashed cross-dresser.”

Monica Lewinski is “shopping a top-secret book project,” the New York Press reports.

Gore Vidal The Observer wonders who’s sick of Naomi Wolf’s Vagina and responds: everybody. Wolf’s latest opus has been taken down by the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Slate, and the Observer (and by Natasha Vargas-Cooper in our fall issue). Meanwhile, readers attempting to buy the e-book in the Apple iTunes store are encountering a different problem. Apple has deemed the title too explicit, and changed it to Va. In honor of Roald Dahl’s birthday today, Puffin is making his classics James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Charlie and the Great Glass

Anne Carson has written the sequel to her novel-in-verse Autobiography of Red. The new book, Red Doc >, will be published in March.

Masha Gessen To mark the one-year anniversary of the beginning of the Occupy Wall Street movement, a coalition of OWS working groups called Strike Debt have released The Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual, a free (and downloadable) book offering “specific tactics for understanding and fighting against the debt system.” Five thousand copies of the book will be distributed around New York City this weekend, and at an Occupy event in Washington Square Park. Last week, Masha Gessen—author of The Man Without a Face (about Vladimir Putin), a book on mathematician Grigori Perelman, and other works—was the editor of one of

Junot Diaz The Booker list is whittled down even further with the announcement of the Booker shortlist. Authors who made the cut are Will Self for Umbrella, Jeet Thayil for Narcopolis, Deborah Levy for Swimming Home, Alison Moore for The Lighthouse, Tan Twan Eng for The Garden of Evening Mists, and Hilary Mantel for Bring Up the Bodies. Jumping on the Fifty Shades bandwagon, Melville Houses sexes up its classic novellas. Kudos to the Feminist Press for being the first to put out an e-book about the arrest and trial of three members of the Russian punk collective Pussy

To coincide with the release of his David Foster Wallace biography, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, author D.T. Max is blogging for the New Yorker about the best DFW documents he unearthed while researching the book. A recent post, on a pointedly arrogant pitch letter that a 23-year-old Wallace sent cold to a literary agency, is especially good. Despite lying about his publication history and having Marilynne Robinson as his thesis advisor (“I’m at a bit of a loss about this. I never met David Wallace, and I was not his thesis advisor”) the young Mr. Wallace

Fran Lebowitz Following in the footsteps of Geoff Dyer, Teju Cole has spent four days on “Roi des Belges, an art installation in the form of a one-room hotel in the shape of a boat.” Day one: “We wake up on the boat. The sky is white, wide. In bed I read Heart of Darkness… I toy with the idea that my essay for Artangel will begin with the words ‘What the fuck am I doing here?’” Jami Attenberg, a forty-year-old freelance writer who has published three books, is broke. In an essay for the Rumpus, she reflects on