Clarice Lispector The five year dispute over the estate of philanthropist and author Brooke Astor has been settled, according to the Wall Street Journal. Among the beneficiaries will be the New York Public Library (NYPL), who will recieve about $15 million. The New York Times calls on readers to complete one of the suggested exercises in Draw It With Your Eyes Closed, Paper Monument’s new book on the art of the art assignment, which Jerry Saltz calls “a catheter to the creative self. An instant indispensable classic. An art-school in a book; and a lot cheaper.” n+1 takes on

Adrienne Rich Poet and essayist Adrienne Rich has died at at her home in Santa Cruz of complications from long-term rheumatoid arthritis. Here is a 2002 profile of Rich, and a full bibliography at the Poetry Foundation. Less than a month after Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes bought The New Republic, the nearly century-old magazine has brought down its online paywall. David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King is about to be released as a paperback—with four previously unpublished scenes. PWxyz reveals what the new material is about, and what it adds to the posthumous book. An argument over the relative

Karl Lagerfeld’s library, via Bookriot The Observer’s Rozalia Jovanovic writes up Choire Sicha’s inaugural column for Bookforum—an investigation into the life and tweets of “cultural truffle hound” and MoMA curator Klaus Biesenbach. “While Mr. Biesenbach’s celebrity obsession is not exactly news,” Jovanovic writes, “Mr. Sicha does remind us that it does still make us a tad uncomfortable to see the curator at one of the world’s top institutions getting into the pit with the rest of us.” Paris Review editor Sadie Stein has become the editor of the magazine’s Daily blog. Stein is replacing senior editor Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn, who’s

Chuck Palahniuk After eight years at the helm of Vice, former editor Jesse Pearson left the magazine in 2010 with relatively little fanfare. But come September, Pearson is preparing to return to the magazine world with Exploded View Quarterly, a new publication aiming to fall somewhere in the “center of the lit-mag spectrum—neither a twee indie journal tailored to precious 20-somethings nor a highbrow M.F.A.-department circular.” The quarterly is co-founded by hardcore musician and writer Sam McPheeters, who just published his first novel, The Loom of Ruin. Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk is doing fine after a freak car

Antonio Tabucci Renowned Italian novelist Antonio Tabucchi died last night of cancer at his home in Lisbon at the age of 68. Tabucchi, who has been in the running several times as a possible Nobel Prize contender, is the author of more than two dozen books, seven of which have been translated into English. His most famous novel is 1994’s Pereira Declares, about the struggle against fascism in Portugal. Read an excerpt of Tabucchi’s 1997 novel The Missing Head here. Jeanettte Winterson explains what she calls the “asymmetrical” literary judgment between men and women: “If Henry Miller writes Tropic

The Occupy Wall Street Library, Zuccotti Park, 2011 Brian McGreevy’s eccentric mystery novel Hemlock Grove—which will be published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux later this month—is going to be adapted into a Netflix original series. In Lapham’s Quarterly, Simon Winchester details the mysterious origins and long gestation of the Dictionary of American Regional English, which was started in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1965 and only recently was fully completed. New York City police confiscated a brand-new Occupy Wall Street Library in Union Square on Wednesday. Activists had rebuilt the library by 7pm, and police took it down by 10pm, prompting

Nescio Meehan Crist and Tim Requarth highlight some problems with Jonah Lehrer’s theory of creativity, and explain why his “mash-up” technique of arguing through anecdotes and science reporting falls flat in his new book, Imagine. As they note: “If dubious interpretations of scientific data appeared only once in Imagine, it might be a worrisome fluke; but they appear multiple times, which is cause for real concern.” After a raucous book party and drunken agreement, the New York Observer goes on a New Jersey pilgrimage with Gideon Lewis-Kraus. On a related note, here’s a survey of the history of travel

An in-house scoop: Bookforum editor Chris Lehmann has informed us that the ink has dried on his book deal with Metropolitan Books. The working title of Lehmann’s latest—a follow-up to his 2010 Rich People Things—is The Money Cult and will be edited by Sara Bershtel. Lehmann says the book is “an effort to account for the missing reform tradition in American Protestantism, while also accounting for the more irrational, quasi-spiritual features of our civic worship of the market economy.” Lehmann adds: “I’m delighted to be taking this project on, since it combines two long-standing obsessions. And I’m really excited to

Chris Kyle The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq may be winding down, but military memoirs written by former soldiers—such as Chris Kyle’s bestseller American Sniper—are gaining momentum. “I’ve been doing these kinds of books for 15 years, but it’s not until recently that they have really taken off,” said Marc Resnick, an executive editor at St. Martin’s Press, told the New York Times. The paper notes that the last time this genre was so big was in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Why isn’t Mike Daisey like John D’Agata? Simple, says Slate: Because Daisey wasn’t up front with

Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn Reading the debates over Mike Daisey’s deviations from the facts onThis American Life, do you ever get the sense that we’ve been here before? Harper’s has hired Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn as their new senior reviews editor. Foley-Mendelssohn, who currently works at the Paris Review, comes to Harper’s via The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. Have you ever wondered how top-shelf chefs manage to run their restaurants and find time to publish cookbooks and memoirs? Simple: They use “food ghosts” and “writer-cooks.” At the NYRB, Bookforum contributor Eric Banks weighs in on the New Museum

Robert Silvers Charles McGrath reports on a question that literary journalists and editors have been asking for years: Who will replace Robert Silvers as the editor of the New York Review of Books? The answer probably won’t be coming anytime soon: According to Silvers, the question of who will succeed him is “not one that is presenting itself.” The recent fact/fiction/journalism debates have focused mostly on John D’Agata’s book About a Mountain, but it also hit radio waves last week after it was revealed that This American Life’s most popular episode ever—about the conditions of workers at an Apple

Roberto Bolano Amanda Knox, the American student who was accused of murdering her British roommate in Italy, has signed a seven-figure book deal with HarperCollins, but she won’t have the first word. Raffaele Sollecito, Knox’s former boyfriend, has sold his own book about the murder trial and acquittal, the not-so-subtly titled Presumed Guilty: My Journey to Hell and Back with Amanda Knox, to Simon Schuster. Sollecito’s book will appear this fall, clearly looking to get a jump on Knox’s title, due out sometime next year. Congratulations to Artforum on releasing its fantastic new iPhone app! Everybody should download it

Clancy Martin Before there was John D’Agata, there was Truman Capote. Jack Shafer writes: “Both love ‘real’ facts, but when blocked by journalistic convention from the literary effects they desire, they willingly leapt that fence to create whatever rules they needed to enhance their work.” The difference between them, however, is that while Capote steadfastly resisted suggestions that some of his journalism was fictionalized (despite ample evidence to the contrary), D’Agata is up front about blurring genres, and gets around the problem of fact-bending by calling himself an “essayist.” Amazon has renewed its $25,000 grant to the Writers Retreat

Christopher Walken, audiobook reader for “Where the Wild Things Are.” Consider the interrobang. When ad executive Martin Speckter debuted the half question mark-half exclamation point in 1962, the punctuation point earned write-ups in the Wall Street Journal and Time, and was canonized in several American dictionaries. And then it disappeared. The Millions met up with Speckter’s widow to discuss its rise and fall in popularity, and address the question—what happened to the interrobang‽ There’s no point in finishing bad books, but should we feel obligated to finish good ones? “The Internet,” Harper’s publisher John MacArthur claims in an op-ed,

At htmlgiant, Lily Hoang asks: Is the NEA punishing writers who have published books at BlazeVox, which in some cases has required authors to pay a percentage of their own publishing costs? A twelve-hundred-page erotic novel some are calling “mommy porn” has landed at the top of the New York Times bestseller list for combined print and ebook fiction. Fifty Shades of Gray, which originated as Twilight fan fiction, reimagines “the Bella and Edward love affair set in contemporary Seattle, Washington, with Bella as the young college graduate virgin and Edward as the masterful billionaire with secret sexual predilections.”

Chris Hughes Twenty-eight-year-old Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes has just bought The New Republic, and has assumed the dual role of the magazine’s publisher and editor-in-chief. Hughes plans to bring the ninety-eight-year-old magazine into the digital age, the New York Times reports, and wants to focus on “distributing the magazine’s long-form journalism through tablet computers like the iPad.” Gawker chief Nick Denton has a new approach to the “problem” of nasty online comments, he announced today during a panel at South by Southwest. Gawker commenters are notoriously snarky, and reining in “hateful behavior” has long been a problem for the

Patrick DeWitt The National Book Critics Circle presented its awards for the best books of 2011 at a ceremony in Manhattan last night. The fiction prize went to Edith Pearlman for her short story collection Binocular Vision; Maya Jasanoff won in the nonfiction category for Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World; Laura Kasischke won in poetry for Space, in Chains; John Lewis Gaddis’s George F. Kennan won best biography; autobiography went to Mira Bartók for The Memory Palace; and the award for criticism went to Geoff Dyer for Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and

NBCC award fiction finalist Teju Cole. For his next project, Bret Easton Ellis is tapping into the lewder side of Hollywood. The American Psycho author is casting boy-next-door porn star James Deen as the lead of his “micro-budget noir movie,” titled The Canyons. J. Hoberman, recently laid off by the Village Voice, has become a columnist at Tablet. At Flavorwire, novelist Adam Wilson—author of the bleak suburban comedy Flatscreen—picks the top ten slacker novels, including Iris Owen’s After Claude, Sam Lipsyte’s Home Land, and the New Testament. In Wilson’s view, Jesus was not just a fictional character but also

James Atlas Amazon has hired James Atlas—who wrote the definitive biography of Saul Bellow—to edit a new series of biographies called Amazon Lives, with titles scheduled to start appearing in June 2013. Amazon has been steadily preparing to become a powerful publishing presence. The company is clearly set up to sell its own titles online, but how do you sell books published by Amazon in the competition’s bookstores (in Barnes and Nobles, for example)? You change the publisher’s name from Amazon Books to New Harvest Books, and you distribute them through another publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Home Depot has

Kate Bolick Alexander Star, formerly an editor at Lingua Franca and the New York Times Magazine, is leaving his current position at the New York Times Book Review to become a senior editor at Farrar, Straus Giroux. The Awl recounts how in the late 1950s Saul Bellow helped his closest friend get a teaching job—without realizing this so-called friend was sleeping with his wife. Canada’s National Post is taking a fast and dirty approach to e-books, publishing as many (and as many different kinds) as possible to see what sells. Timothy McSweeney—after whom Dave Eggers named his notorious literary