David Wojnarowicz, photographed by Peter Hujar. Guernica and Interview are running excerpts of Cynthia Carr’s excellent new biography of downtown artist David Wojnarowicz (that’s pronounced Voy-nar-o-vitch). And if you haven’t read it already in print, check out Luc Sante’s equally excellent review of the book from our summer issue. A devotional choral work by sixteenth-century composer Thomas Tallis has raced to the top of the UK classical music charts after getting a mention in the sadomasochistic mommy porn trilogy, 50 Shades of Gray. Meanwhile, at the New York Times, Adam Sternbergh muses about whether it’s creepy to see somebody

A still from the BBC’s Jane Austen videogame. Graywolf releases the trailer (which is really more of an epic short video) for Josh Cohen’s forthcoming book, Four New Messages. “Emission” stars Girls actor Alex Karpovsky, and was directed by Brian Spinks. The book will be out in early August. A blogger for Boston-based literary journal Ploughshares has been reprimanded for critiquing other publications on the magazine’s website, and retaliated by leaking an email from the magazine managing editor to the Observer. “After some upsetting conversations regarding the nature and tone of the opinions I’ve expressed over my nine posts,

William Gibson Little, Brown has paid a jaw-dropping seven-figure advance to Australian writer Hannah Kent for her debut novel Burial Rights. Kent, 27, works at the literary magazine Kill Your Darlings. Her novel is about the last woman to be publicly beheaded in 1830. Twenty years ago, William Gibson wrote a poem, put it on a floppy disk, and coded it to self-destruct after one reading. Now, a PhD student studying cryptology has created a replica of the coded poem and challenged hackers to crack it. To sweeten the deal, whoever does so first will get a complete set

Neil Gaiman A two-volume e-book claiming to contain images of one hundred previously undiscovered drawings by Caravaggio has been pulled from Amazon in the wake of suspicion over its scholarly legitimacy. While art historians Maurizio Bernardelli Curuz and Adriana Conconi Fedrigolli say that they found the lost sketches at a castle archive in Milan, archivists contended that they had no record of working with the pair. “A serious scholar doesn’t produce an e-book,” said former archive director Maria Teresa Fiorio. Serious scholars may not produce e-books, but apparently the Vatican does. Neil Gaiman has signed a five-book deal with

The Garden of Lost and Found author Dale Peck After optioning E.L. James’s 50 Shades of Gray last March for a staggering $5 million, Universal and Focus Pictures have finally attached some names to the project: Michael De Luca and Dana Brunetti, who have been hired as producers. The film, however, is still in need of a director. (There’s no word on whether the studios will pick up Bret Easton Ellis, who has been vying for the job via a very enthusiastic Twitter campaign.) At the New Yorker’s Page Turner blog, Michael Cunningham completes his white-knuckled, blow-by-blow account of

Zadie Smith’s next novel NW comes out in September. The Guardian “discovers” literary Brooklyn in a breathless essay that name checks every Brooklyn-based writer from James Agee to Martin Amis, and then goes on to detail their weekly soccer games and favorite coffee shops. For readers without the time or patience to read the article, Moby Lives provides a snarky summary, which ends by naming every Brooklyn author named in this “invaluable work of reportage.” Nathan Englander beat out Etgar Keret, Sarah Hall and Kevin Barry to win the 25,000 euro Frank O’Connor prize for his short story collection

Gabriel Garcia Marquez Novelist Patrick Somerville recounts how a critic’s misreading got his fourth book panned in the New York Times, and how an email correspondence between one of the novel’s characters and a Times editor resulted in a correction. Meanwhile, Publisher’s Weekly looks into how much a NYT Book Review write-up really matters in terms of sales. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s brother has revealed that the Colombian writer’s career is effectively over due to dementia, The Guardian reported this weekend. Garcia Marquez, now 85 and the author of five novels and dozens of essay and story collections, has been

Slavoj Zizek Oxford University Press has been fined 1.9 million pounds after it was revealed that two of the publisher’s subsidiaries bribed Kenyan and Tanzanian government officials to secure contracts for school textbooks in those countries. After a “heated auction,” Ecco has won the rights to a memoir by U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey. The book, tentativey scheduled to be released in 2014, “explores Trethewey’s experience growing up mixed race in the South of the ’70s and ’80s, her close relationship with her mother, who was later murdered by her stepfather, a Vietnam veteran, and the repercussions and resonances

Meyer, Scherer Rockcastle’s design of the McAllen Pubilc Library (formerly a Wal-Mart) in Texas. At the Paris Review blog, Clancy Martin recounts a trip to St. Petersburg, which featured shots of vodka, dancing bears, and his own mission to sleep with a Russian “whom he did not have to pay.” Classic kids show Reading Rainbow was canceled in 2009 after twenty-six years on PBS, but thanks to a new initiative by longtime host LeVar Burton, it’s now reincarnated as an app. The “Reading Rainbow” app, geared toward kids between three and nine, “is just an updated, interactive version of

The Book that Can’t Wait, written in disappearing ink. The Observer investigatives whether tax reasons (as opposed to a pure love of Brooklyn) was behind Martin Amis’s decision to purchase a $2.5 million brownstone in Cobble Hill. Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style gets the hip-hop video treatment. HarperCollins CEO Victoria Barnsley tells the media that she has a good feeling about News Corp’s decision to break their news outlets—which includes HarperCollins—into a company separate from its cable-entertainment channels. While Barnsley isn’t sure precisely what the move will mean for HarperCollins, at the company’s annual party last night,

An online ad for Jennifer Weiner’s new book, The Next Best Thing, might look oddly familiar. That’s because the ad, which features Weiner donning a brown vest and pink collared shirt, is a subtle jab at Jeffrey Eugenides, who famously graced a Times Square billboard last year in a similar ensemble to promote The Marriage Plot. The ad reads:“Jeffrey Eugenides doesn’t have a book out this summer, but Jennifer Weiner has The Next Best Thing.” The diaries of obscure mid-century New York novelist Dawn Powell are going on sale, the New York Times reports, but not at an auction

To make Jane Austen and Bronte more appealing to readers raised on Twilight and the Hunger Games series, publishers are repackaging the classics to give them more sex appeal. Sometimes the references aren’t so thinly veiled—HarperCollins released an edition of Wuthering Heights with the inscription, “Bella Edward’s favorite book.” As if a fatwa weren’t enough, Iranian video game designers are continuing their campaign against Salman Rushdie in pixels. They have reportedly “completed initial phases of production” of the game “The Stressful Life of Salman Rushdie and Implementation of his Verdict,” according to the Guardian. Though details about the game’s

The Supreme Court stood a great deal of conventional political wisdom on its head today by upholding the bulk of the 2010 Affordable Care Act—the landmark law instituting something like universal health care in these United States. Oral arguments over the ruling—National Federation of Independent Businesses v. Sebelius for all you case-law geeks out there—strongly suggested that the high court would strike the law down, finding that the “individual mandate” (the requirement for all Americans to purchase some sort of health coverage) was a violation of the Commerce Clause. This outcome indeed seemed so certain among the chin-wagging pundit set

Louisa May Alcott, the inspiration for Fifty Shades of Louisa May. London has just been poetry-bombed. As part of the build-up to the summer Olympics, on Tuesday night, the Chilean art collective Casagrande dropped one hundred thousand poems from a helicopter on the south bank of London. Summer in New York City can be bad now, but imagine what it was like before air conditioning. Arthur Miller recalls, “people on West 110th Street, where I lived, were a little too bourgeois to sit out on their fire escapes, but around the corner on 111th and farther uptown mattresses were

Sven Lindqvist A federal judge has set June 3, 2013 as the trial date in the e-book price-fixing case. That day, the Department of Justice will face off against Apple and publishers Penguin and Macmillan (which owns FSG, Henry Holt, and Picador) over whether they colluded to rig the prices of e-books. (Simon and Schuster, Hachette, and HarperCollins, the other three publishers who were initially accused, agreed to an out-of-court settlement). In an odd twist, the trial date is only a day before the beginning of next year’s Book Expo. Novelist, essayist, and journalist Nora Ephron died last night

Blake Butler The Atlantic has posted a short and provocative piece titled “Why Porn and Journalism Have the Same Big Problem.” The problem is getting people to pay in a world where so much porn, and so much journalism, is free. A sample money quote: “ Like the porn studios, big media companies have seen their own profits plummet in the face of free aggregators, amateur bloggers, and the nearly limitless competition supplied by the web.” At the New York Review blog, Michael Chabon contributes a cranky post about dreams. “Pretty much the only thing I hate more than

451: The next internet error code? The New York Daily News has sent Alec Baldwin a gift basket full of anger-management books after he punched one of the newspaper’s photographers in the face last week. Error codes “404 Not Found” and “403 Forbidden” are familiar to all internet users, but websurfers may soon be encountering a new one in honor of recently deceased sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury. In a nod to Bradbury’s dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451, software developer Tim Bray has proposed that the code “451” be designated to websites that are blocked due to government censorship. The Rumpus’s

Paris’s Shakespeare and Company bookstore After three years helming The Book, The New Republic’s books site, Isaac Chotiner is leaving the digital realm to become a senior editor at the print magazine. He will be replaced by TNR deputy editor Chloë Schama. Bucking expectations and economic trends, the New York Times reports that bookstores are booming in France. Thanks in part to a system of fixed pricing, book sales increased 6.5 percent between 2003 and 2011, and e-book sales remain a fraction of total sales. Citing the centrality of writers to French culture, the head of a small press

Alice Walker Alice Walker has refused to let an Israeli publisher release a translation of The Color Purple in protest of that country’s treatment of Palestinians. In a statement, Walker writes that she has “determined that Israel is guilty of apartheid and persecution of the Palestinian people, both inside Israel and also in the Occupied Territories.” Reflecting on Bret Easton Ellis’s claim that he wants to make a movie out of Fifty Shades of Gray, Laura Miller considers bad books that have led to good movies. Can authorial style be broken down by mathematical modelling? Yes, according to mathematician

Jonah Lehrer n+1 is launching a series of ebooks that will excerpt selections from their archives. First up, Bad Education, featuring a sampling of “the magazine’s best and crankiest writings about education,” with essays by Christian Lorentzen, Keith Gessen, Astra Taylor, and more. In its heyday, The Baffler magazine was known mainly for two things: witty cultural criticism and an erratic publishing cycle. Due to an array of problems—most notably a fire in the office in 2001—one could never be sure when the next issue of the “journal that blunts the cutting edge” would arrive. But the revamped magazine