Award-winning humorist and essayist David Rakoff died at his home in Manhattan last night after an extended battle with cancer, it was reported on Friday. He was forty-seven. Rakoff was a longtime contributor to This American Life, The New York Times, and GQ, and was author of the collections Don’t Get Too Comfortable, Fraud, and most recently, Half Empty. He was renowned for his intelligence, dark humor, and celebration of negative thinking—qualities that were recognized last fall when he was awarded the Thurber Prize for American Humor. After years working as a translator and publisher, Rakoff caught his break when

With 5.3 million copies sold, Fifty Shades of Gray has beaten out Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code to become Britain’s bestselling book of all time. In other Fifty Shades news, a spoof of the book, The Diamond Club, has also become a bestselling e-book. James Franco is holding an open casting call in Jackson, Mississippi, for his adaptation of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. He’ll need all the help he can get—the novel is narrated by fifteen characters. According to reports from a local TV station, filmmakers are seeking out “white boys 8 to 10 years

Joan Rivers at Costco To get Costco to carry her new book, I Hate Everyone… Starting With Me, Joan Rivers decided to chain herself to a shopping cart in a Burbank, California, Costco store and air her complaint that the company won’t stock the book because it has dirty words on the back. Joy Press—formerly an editor at the Village Voice Literary Supplement and Salon—has just been promoted at the LA Times to become its books and culture editor. A new startup offers customers the full Fifty Shades of Gray treatment. According to MySecretLuxury’s website: “So you read the

Lena Dunham touts the New Yorker’s new iPhone app. Novelist Paulo Coehlo picks a fight with the master of modernism. Speaking to a Brazilian newspaper, Coehlo remarked, “one of the books that caused great harm was James Joyce’s Ulysses, which is pure style. There is nothing there. Stripped down, Ulysses is a twit.” John Banville, or rather, his alter ego, Benjamin Black, will revive Raymond Chandler’s famous noir detective Phillip Marlowe in a new novel set to come out next year. According to publisher Henry Holt, “the book will have an original plot and take place in the 1940s.

Sex and death are everywhere in fiction, but why are there no birth scenes in novels? Americans are more embarrassed to read President Obama’s memoir in public than Fifty Shades of Grey. According to a recent 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll, sixteen percent of people polled said they wouldn’t pull out Dreams From My Father in public, while only five percent said the same of the mommy porn phenomenon. When tracking down sources fails: Language Log uses linguistic analysis to fact-check New Yorker pieces, focusing in on a Jared Diamond’s article about a clan war in Papua, New Guinea. Kindle

Blurb king Gary Shteyngart Errol Morris’s book A Wilderness of Error won’t be out until September, but it’s already gathering attention in the Twittersphere. Morris returns to the murder trial that Janet Malcom made famous in the Journalist and the Murderer and comes to the conclusion—contrasting Malcolm’s—that accused killer Jeffrey MacDonald was wrongly imprisoned. “Anyone who read Journalist and the Murderer must read this new errol morris book,” tweeted Boston Globe reporter Leon Neyfakh. “Janet malcolm should be ashamed of herself.” Adam Sternberg, a culture editor at the New York Times Magazine, has sold his first novel, Shovel Ready—about

Jared Diamond Among the many gaffes that Mitt Romney made on his recent trip to the Middle East, one in particular has raised the ire of Guns, Germs, and Steel author Jared Diamond. In a speech in Jerusalem, Romney characterized Diamond’s book as saying that “the physical characteristics of the land account for the differences in the success of the people that live there.” Not so, responds Diamond in a New York Times op-ed: “That is so different from what my book actually says that I have to doubt whether Mr. Romney read it.” Diamond ends on a particularly

London is now home to the world’s most distracting maze. (It’s made out of 250,000 books). Do spoilers ruin a book? Not necessarily, says a paper in the September issue of Psychological Science. While most people say that they’d rather not know how something ends, a study conducted by the psychology department at the University of California at San Diego found that people actually enjoy books and movies more when they know what’s coming. In light of the recent Jonah Lehrer scandal, Craig Silverman considers the warning signs that suggest that a promising young journalist is developing dangerous habits.

Gore Vidal—the novelist, critic, political commentator, and formidable verbal jouster—has died. In a 2007 interview with Bookforum, Vidal holds forth on movies, the end of the novelist, his political career, and the influence of Montaigne on his work.

F. Scott Fitzgerald On Monday, the New Yorker published F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1936 story “Thank You for the Light” seventy-six years after they initially rejected it. “Running it would be altogether out of the question,” one editor wrote in an internal memo at the time. “It seems to us so curious and so unlike the kind of thing we associate with him and really too fantastic.” Bookforum contributor Natasha Vargas-Cooper talks to The Billfold about the economics of being a freelancer, why she decided to move in with her parents when she started writing professionally, and how she got

Filmmaker Chris Marker How GoodReads hides some bad book reviews to keep the site from degenerating into a commenter free-for-all. Popular science writer Jonah Lehrer has resigned from his position as a staff writer at the New Yorker after confessing to having fabricating several quotes from Bob Dylan in his latest book, Imagine: How Creativity Works. Lehrer was confronted about the quotes in an email from journalist and Dylan diehard Michael Moynihan last week (who was just interviewed by the Observer about the matter) and came clean on Monday morning. Is there any point to the word “literary?” “It

At The Millions, Ted Scheinman considers attention deficit in literature—that is, not the representation of ADD in books, but rather how short attention spans can be in the classics. The canonical example of a “jumpy, distracted” book is Tristam Shandy. In Shandy, Scheinman claims that not only is “attention deficit, for Sterne… not something to be feared in the reader—it is the basis for his process of composition.” It’s the how-to issue of the New York Times Book Review. In this issue, Colson Whitehead explains how to write (among his tips: “Keep a dream diary”); Roger Rosenblatt lays out

There are rumors that Newsweek is about to abandon its print version and exist entirely online. The trailer for the film adaptation of David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas leaked online yesterday, and though Warner Bros. asked most blogs to take it down, critics are already weighing in. “If you’ve ever wanted to see [Tom] Hanks as a goateed, balding London gangster, or [Hugh] Grant as a warpainted cannibal, the chance has finally arrived,” IndieWire remarked. The film is directed by Tom Twyker, of Run Lola Run fame, and the Wachovski brothers. It will debut at the Toronto International Film

The Man Booker Prize committee has released the longlist of this year’s finalists, twelve novels that, in the committee’s description, span “goodness, madness and bewildering urban change.” Nominees include Will Self, Ned Beauman, Jeet Thayil, Deborah Levy, and Hilary Mantel, who is the only previous winner on the list. A full list of the books—as well as excerpts—is available at The Millions. First there was HBO, now there’s Random House Television. The publisher announced on Wednesday that it’s pairing up with FremantleMedia to launch the new arm, which will “focus on creating and developing television content from Random House

London Mayor Boris Johnson, preparing for his Olympic address NPR is conducting a poll to name the best YA novel ever written. The New York Times profiles the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School, a week-long program course that draws three hundred librarians, dealers, scholars, conservators, collectors, and aficionados to Charlottesville for five weeks each year. Here’s a taste of what book camp is like: “In a Hogwarts-worthy reading room on an upper floor of the university’s Alderman Library one morning, students in Advanced Descriptive Bibliography were bent over books with tape measures and mini light sabers called Zelcos,

Samuel Beckett Angela’s Ashes, Remembrance of Things Past, Lolita, and Jaws top the Los Angeles Times’ list of books you definitely don’t want to read at the beach. HarperCollins is taunting readers with serialized excerpts from the “enhanced e-book” edition of Michael Chabon’s forthcoming novel, Telegraph Avenue. The book—Chabon’s first in five years—is billed as “an intimate epic, a NorCal Middlemarch set to the funky beat of classic vinyl soul-jazz and pulsing with a virtuosic, pyrotechnical style all of its own.” The first serial is be available to download for free today. At NPR, David Orr reflects on the

Roald Dahl Electric Literature excerpts part of The Devil’s Treasure, Mary Gaitskill’s novel-in-progress about a little girl wandering through hell. What are a few ways to land a multi-million-dollar (or even a million-dollar) book deal? You can write a debut novel starring a teenage female protagonist, or try self-publishing your books first. If that doesn’t work, you might want to serialize your novels—per Mark Danielewski—or write a celebrity memoir… Moby Lives considers what we can learn from the six-figure book deals of 2012. From a Craig Brown’s book One on One, an account of how Kingsley Amis advised Roald

C.S. Lewis With 650 votes, the History News Network has crowned historian David Barton’s The Jefferson Lies “the least credible history book in print.” (It narrowly beat Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States by nine votes). If you live in New York and are interested in the academic and the obscure, we advise you to check out Cabinet’s literary firesale. From their Facebook page: “Cabinet’s bookshelves are overflowing, and we are selling selected items from our extraordinary library. Our eclectic assortment includes academic tomes, art monographs, poetry collections, journal issues, political treatises, fiction, and more. Books will

What the Library of Immediacy will look like. Outcry and a debate over the value of academic presses has erupted in response to the University of Missouri’s recent decision to close its publishing house and reinvent it as something different. In an email that went out this week, university officials announced plans to defund the press, and relaunch it as a new publishing operation run by four paid staffers and five grad student interns. In addition to scholarly books, the more than fifty-year-old press has put out collected works by Langston Hughes and Ralph Waldo Emerson, as well as

Anne-Marie Slaughter After months of warning, Larry McMurtry’s Last Book sale is finally under way in Archer City, Texas. The novelist and famed used-book seller is offloading two-thirds of the inventory from his world-renowned bookstore, Booked Up. Even though McMurtry is shedding 300,000 titles, he’s made clear that he has no plans to close the store entirely. Former State Department official Anne-Marie Slaughter has landed a book deal to expand upon her much-discussed essay in The Atlantic about the difficulties women face in balancing their domestic and professional lives. “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” was the cover