Herta Muller Macmillan sci-fi imprint Tor/Forge announced this week that all of its e-books will be DRM-free by July, making it the first major publishing house to drop the digital restriction. In effect, this means that any Tor e-book bought on a Kindle will now be readable on an iPad or Sony e-reader or Nook—thus loosening Amazon’s control over the e-books it sells, which are currently only accessible through a Kindle. At Salon, Jason Farago argues that novels written by straight authors about gay characters, like Herta Muller’s The Hunger Angel, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad,

Lena Dunham With Melville House books lining the walls of the fictional independent publisher in Lena Dunham’s show Girls, viewers could be forgiven for thinking that Dunham’s character was meant to be interning at the Brooklyn-based house (we did). But that’s not the case, says the Los Angeles Times. In 2006, at the recommendation of Lynne Tillman, Dunham interned at Soft Skull books under then-editor Richard Nash. “Oberlin kids were always smart and industrious,” Nash said, referring to his former intern. “My bestselling authors were from Oberlin: David Rees, Matt Sharp… You basically said yes to Oberlin students when

Alex Shakar Last week, The New Yorker’s Ben Greenman, author of the novel Please Step Back, invited his Twitter followers to name the word they would most prefer to see permanently stricken from the English language. After weeding out the political picks (“Obama” and “war” were on many lists), Greenman found that there was an undisputed winner. “In the end, there was a runaway un-favorite: ‘moist.’ People, particularly women, evidently prefer aridity.” Still, “slacks” was the winner. Hundreds of booksellers across the country gave away half a million copies of thirty pre-selected titles last night in honor of Free

Amelia Gray and Etgar Keret at the Los Angeles Times Festival of the Book The New York state education commission scrapped a question on their middle school standardized English exam last week after widespread complaints that the question—a fable about a talking pineapple that challenged a hare to a race—made no sense. This week, the story’s author, writer Daniel Pinkwater took to the Daily News to respond to the incident. “You bet I sold out,” Pinkwater wrote an eighth grader who emailed him to complain. “Not to the Department of Education, but to the publisher of tests, useless programmed

C. E. Morgan, Luc Sante, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, John Wray, Philip Gourevitch, Ruth Franklin, and Gary Panter are among the fifteen winners of the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center fellowship, which awards grantees a private office, a stipend, and research assistance from library staff. If this weren’t enough, it’s been an especially good month for Wray and Franklin—last week, both were awarded Guggenheim fellowships. David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis—starring Robert Pattinson—will be one of the main features at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. A complete festival lineup is available here, and a trailer for the movie (which

Penguin has bought the rights to Jonathan Safran Foer’s next book, Escape from Children’s Hospital, which is a fictionalized account of a real explosion JSF experienced at a summer science camp when he was nine. The incident “left Safran Foer’s best friend without skin on his face or hands,” and left the author “unscathed by inches.” The book will be released in early 2014. They didn’t win the Pulitzer, but the three books nominated have seen a spike in their Amazon sales. Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams jumped from #990 to #98, Karen Russell’s Swamplandia went from #984 to #155,

Amazon Publishing has acquired a ten-year North American license to publish all of the books in Ian Flemming’s “James Bond” series. If you Google the words “About the Author,” Thomas L. Friedman’s biography comes up. At The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal investigates why, and finds that it isn’t a search-engine optimization trick. It turns out that Friedman’s biography actually is the internet’s most linked-to author page—likely from as many detractors as from admirers. (The second result is John Colapinto’s clever 2001 novel of stolen identity, About the Author). Michael Cunningham, one of this year’s Pulitzer jurors, weighs in on the

HHhH author Laurent Binet. Following the controversy surrounding a Gunther Grass poem that criticizes Israel, Dave Eggers says that he will not attend a ceremony in Bremen, Germany, to accept an award from the Gunter Grass Foundation. In 2006, Laurent Binet was horrified to learn that another author had published a novel perilously similar (in content, if not in style) to the one he was working on. Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones was a sprawling Holocaust novel featuring many of the same Nazi SS officers and administrators that would end up in Binet’s novel-in-progress. To address the overlap, Binet,

Michel Foucault PEN has released a statement criticizing the organizers of the London Book Fair for failing to recognize arrested and censored Chinese authors at this year’s Fair, which opens tomorrow and highlights China as the featured country. PEN estimates that at least thirty-five writers are currently imprisoned in China. France has classified philosopher Michel Foucault’s archives as a national treasure. Picador’s new Tumblr has released a literary mixtape that thankfully avoids the cliches of such playlists (for example Guns and Roses’ “Catcher in the Rye;” the 10,000 Maniacs’ “Hey Jack Kerouac”). Instead, we get The Mountain Goats’ “Lovecraft

Elif Shafak Several weeks ago, Turkish novelist Elif Shafak was accused of plagiarizing Zadie Smith’s White Teeth in her new novel Iskender, which was just released in English as Honour. But the real issue isn’t plagiarism, Kaya Genç argues, but Turkey’s discomfort with westernization. As for Smith, she has sent Shafak a letter stating how “ridiculous” she found the accusations. The shortlist for the Dublin-based IMPAC award was announced on Thursday, and includes Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jon McGregor’s Even the Dogs, and Karl Marlante’s Matterhorn. The winner will be announced on June 13. Oxford’s

Eileen Myles, Sarah Manguso, Peter Maas, Ruth Franklin, Alison Bechdel, John Wray, Arthur Phillips, and Lydia Millet are among the winners of the 2012 Guggenheim fellowship. A full list of the Fellows is available here. Galleys of Dan Josefson’s novel That’s Not a Feeling arrived this week with a surprising blurb—from David Foster Wallace, who died in 2008. Perhaps anticipating confusion, Josefson’s publisher, Soho Press, has included an explanatory interview with Josefson admirer Tom Bissell in the galley. Bissell explains that in 2008 he sent the manuscript to Wallace, who then dictated the blurb (“…a bold, funny, mordant, and

Salman Rushdie Here’s a tidbit of literary trivia from Salman Rushdie’s forthcoming memoir: After a fatwa was declared against him, Rushdie was known to his police detail as “Joseph Anton,” a pseudonym in homage to his favorite writers, Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov. The memoir, Joseph Anton, is about this nine-year period of Rushdie’s life, and will be out this September. Stephen Burt talks to Publishers Weekly about being a poetry critic and a poet. In both roles, he pays close attention to language, and describes words like “generous,” “lucid,” “courageous,” and “luminous” as “reviewspeak,” or “thrice-steeped teabags.” Electric

There’s a lot to look forward to on the LA Review of Books relaunched site, which will go live in about a week; we’re especially looking forward to reading Grace Krilanovich on cult filmmaker Kenneth Anger; Thomas Sayers Ellis on poverty, photography, and poetry; Hua Hsu on office chairs; and Robert Polito nominating “three poems that would make great movies.” Two years ago there was an outcry when it was revealed that The Anthology of Rap contained more than a few transcription errors. However, connoisseurs of the forthcoming Snoop Dog book, Rolling Words, need not get excised if they

Gunther Grass “Clearly, this is an issue worth revisiting,” says Geoff Dyer in an article about rereading, which also features short pieces by Hilary Mantel, Marina Warner, and others. Rereading seems to be on people’s minds these days. In the most recent issue of Bookforum, Eric Banks writes about Patricia Meyer Spacks’s On Rereading—and revisits some of his favorite books about horse-racing. Three Cups of Tea author Greg Mortenson, who drew fire from Jon Krakauer last year, has agreed to pay 1 million for “misusing the charity he set up.” The Montana-based charity, which was supposed to promote education

The Awl asks writers and critics which cringeworthy books they loved as teenagers. Ayn Rand, unsurprisingly, earned multiple mentions—Sam Anderson, David Grann, Maud Newton, and Boris Kachka admitted to adolescent flirtations—and Kerouac and the Beats also came up several times. Ariel Levy admits an obsession with the Sweet Valley High series, and Lorin Stein confesses he had “no idea what I thought Being and Time was about.” Harvard professor Robert Darnton announced this week that the Digital Public Library of America is nearing its launch date, and that he has ambitions of competing with Google. In a speech at

Yesterday, five major magazine publishers launched a “digital newsstand” called Next Issue Media. Hearst, Conde Nast, Time Inc., Meredith, and News Corp. have joined forces to offer a service for Tablet readers, who, for a flat monthly fee of $9.99 or $14.99, can have unlimited access to all five publishers’ titles. Poynter calls it “a Netflix for magazines…” Malcolm Gladwell, Zadie Smith, and…Ben Stiller? Photos from Tuesday’s Paris Review revel. Gunter Grass has provoked international anger by publishing a poem in Germany’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung in which he criticizes Israel’s nuclear capacity and Western hypocrisy over what he calls Israel’s

Robert Lowell The New Yorker’s Book Bench has posted a translation of “King Goldenlocks,” one of the almost 500 Bavarian fairy tales recently found in Germany. No book deal, no problem: With financial support from their parents, “hundreds of children and teenagers” are writing and self-publishing their own books, reports the The New York Times. Soon, we’ll be able to roll e-readers up like newspapers. The American Society of Magazine Editors has named its finalists for the 2012 National Magazine Awards. While there are some great picks—David Grann, Aleksander Hemon, and John Jeremiah Sullivan all got well-deserved nods—women are

Last night, at a standing-room-only launch party for the revived Baffler, we heard its new editor in chief John Summers talk about how he inherited the magazine from founder Thomas Frank, and how he really, really will end the magazine’s history of fading in and out of print (with some help from its new distributor, MIT Press). Chris Lehmann, an old Baffler hand and current contributing editor (also an editor of Bookforum), talked about the evolution of the magazine from its Chicago days in the ’90s, noting how the Baffler’s trademark salvos against the status quo are still relevant,

Small Demons, the new website that obsessively maps out cultural allusions found in books, has completed its most challenging project yet: David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. The cataloging is extensive, charting the book’s references to hundreds of people (from Benedict Arnold to Carl Sagan to the Brady Bunch’s Eve Plumb), tobacco and drugs, TV shows (Hawaii Five-O), food and drinks (the Big Mac), cars, weapons, etc. Our favorite category is “Everything Else,” which features Visine, Frisbees, Depends, and Hefty Bags. What makes Small Demons addictive is that you can click on any of these items and find out what other

A photo by John Simpson, inspired by Etgar Keret’s story “Cheesus Christ” The Millions is introducing a new monthly feature called “Post-40 Bloomers,” which “will highlight authors—living and deceased, new-on-the-scene and now long-established—whose first books debuted when they were 40 or older.” (Consider it a counterweight against the New Yorker’s youth-focused 20 under 40.) A tentative list of writers the Millions plans to cover includes Isak Dinesen, Helen DeWitt, and Walker Percy. John Simpson’s photo of a decaying Big Mac billboard has won FSG and Bomb magazine’s “Something Out of Something” contest, which invited participants to submit visual art