For the first time ever, e-books are outselling hardcovers. A new report from the American Association of Publishers finds that in the first quarter of 2012, e-books racked up $282.3 million in sales, while hardcovers trailed behind at $229.6 million. The good news is that sales increased all around: E-book sales went up by 28.1 percent, while hardcovers rose 2.7 percent. BOMB magazine has received a $15,000 grant from Amazon to expand its literary section, First Proof. And speaking of $15,000 Amazon grants, writer Alan Averill was awarded the retailer’s fifth annual Breakthrough Novel Award for his debut, The

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.” According to at least one Huntington, New York bookseller, the new editions are doing surprisingly well. As if a fatwa weren’t enough, Iranian video game designers are continuing their campaign against Salman Rushdie in pixels. Video game designers have reportedly “completed initial phases of production” of the game “The Stressful

James Joyce In response to the rise of author productivity apps—like the ominous “write or die,” which deletes words if you stop typing for more than 45 seconds—Jenny Diski makes a case for slow writing. Grappling with the fact that “much of the great old children’s material, like so much of the great old adult material, is either racist to the core or at least has seriously racist bits,” Stephen Marche wonders if there’s an acceptable way to read these books to your kids. Goodreads tracks the “anatomy of a book discovery,” through the Goodreads stats of Charles Duhigg’s

Jonathan Safran Foer Bret Easton Ellis is severing his real estate ties to New York by renting out his East Village loft apartment, the New York Observer reports. Ellis’s 950 square-foot apartment is available for five grand a month, but those who can’t afford Patrick Bateman level rent are advised to at least check out the American Psycho author’s open house, which is being held later today and this coming Sunday afternoon. Paul Auster, Francine Prose, Colson Whitehead and Kurt Andersen are several of the participants in this year’s Brooklyn Book Festival. A full lineup was announced yesterday. In

Telephone Press founder Paul Legault Bret Easton Ellis is taunting Twitter readers with threats of adapting “mommy porn” series Fifty Shades of Gray into a film, and is using the microblogging service to speculate about cast and crew. “I think David Cronenberg is a great idea for directing Fifty Shades of Gray and we worked together on American Psycho in its initial phase,” Ellis tweeted. “I’m putting myself out there to write the movie adaptation—This is not a joke. Christian Grey and Ana: potentially great cinematic characters.” British art publisher Phaidon Press is for sale, owner Richard Schlagman has

Paul Krugman It is Krugman v. Tanenhaus over at the New York Times, where Krugman’s new book, End this Depression Now! received a not-entirely-positive review in a forthcoming Sunday Times review that Krugman previewed and is already complaining about. Krugman says, ”The New York Times Book Review is run by Sam Tanenhaus, who is very much a neocon, and makes a point whenever a progressive comes out with a book to find someone who will attack it,” before dialing it down, “It’s not really an attack, but the reviewer is shocked at the lack of respect I show for

Sarah Leonard The French Publishers’ Association and the Société des Gens de Lettres, a French society of authors, have dropped a lawsuit protesting Google’s book-scanning efforts in that country. The New York Times reports that Google has struck an agreement with French publishers that would allow them to revive thousands of out-of-print books, and let publishers sell digital editions of those works. The search giant claims that this now makes France the only county with an “industrywide book-scanning agreement in place to cover works that are out of print but still under copyright.” According to Ray Bradbury’s biographer, a

Keira Knightley in Anna Karenina; Focus Features Literary supergroup the Rock Bottom Remainders celebrates their twenty-year anniversary later this month with a concert in Los Angeles. The band currently features authors Scott Turow, Amy Tan, Ridley Pearson, and James McBride, and at various times has included Stephen King, Barbara Kingsolver, Mitch Albom, and many other publishing notables. Is it too much to ask to hope for a battle of the bands between them and lit-crit supergroup the Dog House Band? It’s not light summer reading, but The Los Angeles Review of Books is leading an online book club dedicated

Natasha Trethewey Chuck Klosterman has been named the new Ethicist at the New York Times Magazine. Here is his first column. Condemning books has always been a good way to launch them to bestsellerdom, but the Catholic Church seems to have missed that memo. This week, Sister Margaret Farley’s Just Love jumped from 142,982 to 16 on Amazon’s sales list after the Church denounced the book, a treatise on Christian sexual ethics. Philip Roth paid homage to the recently deceased Carlos Fuentes on Wednesday when he accepted Spain’s Asturias Award for Literature. In honor of this week’s reopening of

Ray Bradbury A group of “female nonfiction storytellers” took a crack at boosting the number of female bylines last week by holding a story-pitching clinic for lady journalists. The event, titled “Throw Like a Girl,” attracted hundreds of people to a bar in Brooklyn, where the panel—featuring an editor for the New York Times, the founder of the Atavist, a writer for New York Magazine, and the founder of the Op-Ed Project— addressed topics ranging from building up the nerve to pitch, developing a tolerance to rejection, and counteracting the male clubbiness of the magazine world. The recently laid-off

Ray Bradbury—the author of Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine, The Martian Chronicles, and many other books—has died at age 91.

George W.S. Trow News from the BEA: New York Review Books has announced that it will launch an e-book series called NYRB Lit in the Fall. Edited by frequent New York Review of Books contributor Sue Halpern, the series, which will include fictino and nonfiction, will release ten e-books a year. The first two will be Lindsay Clarke’s The Water Theatre and Zena el Khalil’s Beirut, I Love You: A Memoir. Amazon has bought the backlist rights to more than three thousand titles by Avalon Books, a sixty-two-year-old publishing house that specializes in mystery, romance, and Western novels. Norman

Matt Gineo, winner of the 2011 Hemingway lookalike competition. Dave Eggers has announced his latest novel—A Hologram for the King, which will be released on June 28—in an interview with fellow writer Stephen Elliott. When he’s not encouraging kids to skip college, Paypal cofounder Peter Thiel has been channeling his energy and resources into an initiative he calls the Seasteading Institute, dedicated to constructing “floating cities” in international zones. Thiel’s latest plan to build one of these libertarian utopias in Honduras was recently ensnared in red tape, but according to a colleague, even though the city doesn’t exist yet,

A scene from the Hay Festival The new Bookforum is out. Here’s Christian Lorentzen’s essay on money novels in the 21st century. Bad news at GOOD: Only a day after releasing its twenty-seventh issue, the mag laid off a large chunk of its editorial staff, including executive editor Ann Friedman, lifestyle editor Amanda Hess, senior editor Cord Jefferson, and associate editor Nona Willis Aronowitz (who edited last year’s Out of the Vinyl Deeps, a collection of rock criticism by her mother, Ellen Willis). To the delight of book publicists everywhere, after a two-year hiatus, Oprah is re-launching her book

A French children’s book. Embarrassing photos may never disappear from the internet, but it turns out that an author’s early fanfiction can. When Galleycat went searching for the origins of 50 Shades of Grey (which originated as Twilight fanfiction), they found that all of E.L. James’s Twilight-inspired writing had been removed from her website. Galleycat queried the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine about accessing the vanished files, and was told that James had requested that her work not be archived. So what’s behind the case of the missing fanfic? Carolyn Kellogg speculates that there might have been a copyright issue.

Lunch time poet Frank O’Hara. From the New Yorker’s Page Turner blog, a post about Joan Acocella’s recent article about the descriptivist versus prescriptivist grammarian wars, and some sound advice: Don’t go into a bar and ask, “For whom are we rooting today?” Can you take back poetry? Larkin’s and Auden’s most well-known lines about love—“What will survive of us is love” and “We must love one another or die”—are anthologized and taught in classrooms all over the world. “But what’s remarkable about them,” Ron Rosenbaum writes at Slate, is that their authors “agonized over them, were conflicted and

Michelle Obama gardening After watching the trailer for Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby, The Paris Review Daily retreated into the film archives and returned with a rare cinematic Gatsby—silent footage from a 1926 adaptation of the book. Russian publishers have refused to touch British historian Orlando Figes’s 2007 book about life in Stalinist Russia, but perhaps not for the reasons Figes claims. While Figes says that his book was censored for its political content, in a June article for The Nation, political scientists Peter Reddaway and Stephen Cohen argue that it was more likely passed over on

Saddam Hussein’s daughter, Raghad Saddam Hussein, is looking for a publisher for his father’s memoir Saddam Hussein’s eldest daughter is looking for a publisher to release her father’s handwritten memoirs. New York magazine has a buzzy feature on how the New York Times’s business strategy and growth have been the result of a longstanding partnership between Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. and advertising executive Janet Robinson—and how with Sulzberger’s recent marriage, Robinson has “found herself caught between her increasingly remote boss and a frustrated family ­worried over the future of its 116-year-old fortune.” After her previous nonfiction book got good reviews

Edmund White Late last year, author Edmund White suffered a stroke and recovered; sadly, according to news reports based on the author’s Facebook page, White had another stroke earlier this month. He seems to be on the mend again. Yesterday, a blog post wished him a speedy recovery “so he could continue his work and his feud with Gore Vidal.” White wrote a response: “Gore Vidal and I have buried the hatchet. Thanks for your good wishes.” In February, just a few months after White’s first stroke, he chatted with Michael Silverblatt on Bookworm about his newest novel, Jack

Edna St. Vincent Millay Critic and historian Paul Fussell, author of the the award-winning WWI study The Great War and Modern Memory, has died, the New York Times reports. The trailer for Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby is online, and we have very mixed feelings about it. But if you’re into the idea of a Leonardo DiCaprio-starring, Kanye West-soundtracked take on Fitzgerald—which is also shot in 3-D—this is probably for you. In other adaptation news, New York reports that James Bobin will direct The Confederacy of Dunces, and that Zach Galifianakis will star as Reilly. Although Richard