Naomi Wolff arrested while occupying Wall Street. “I hit on the first sentence while walking,” Hisham Matar tells Hari Kunzru about his second novel, Anatomy of a Disappearance. “And it’s, ‘There are times when my father’s absence is as heavy as a child sitting on my chest.’ I kept repeating the sentence in my head and thought, okay, this is a sentence that has in it the music, the DNA, the logic of this character in this book and I will let the sentence write the next sentence and so on.” In the new issue of Guernica, Kunzru and

Klaus Kinski, with puppy. Fourth time’s the charm? Julian Barnes has finally won the Booker Prize for his new novel, Sense of an Ending. Safety concerns are swirling around Russian journalist Masha Gessen’s forthcoming biography of Vladimir Putin. Dubbed one of the most talked-about books at the Frankfurt Book Fair by Publishers Weekly, “a rep at Riverhead [which is set to publish the book in March] said the book contains ‘explosive’ information about the Russian prime minister, and that could be a hazard for Gessen, especially in a country that is notoriously dangerous for journalists.” Amazon isn’t making any

Young-adult novelist Lauren Myracle has agreed to withdraw her book Shine from the shortlist of National Book Award finalists in keeping with the board’s request. Myracle says she was asked to do so to “preserve the integrity of the award and the judges’ work.” Soon after the five finalists in the young-adult-fiction category were announced last week, a sixth book, Chime by Franny Billingsley, was added. The National Book Foundation hasn’t said that they got the titles mixed up, but they did apologize for the mistake. Looking into how could a single author could have written or edited more

A public bookshelf in Karlsruhe, Germany. A terrible, if practical solution to the problem of book storage: A company called 1Dollarscan will scan all your books and send you the PDFs for a dollar per hundred digitized pages. The books, tragically, are then pulped in accordance with American copyright law. Free public bookshelves are popping up all over Germany. Jeff Sharlet’s Occupy Writers petition has gotten more than three hundred signatories, including Salman Rushdie, Judith Butler, and Jennifer Egan. “I was holding out hope for George Will,” Sharlet joked to the Observer. “He wrote me a long nice e-mail

Lewis Hyde, John D’Agata, D.A. Powell, Jonathan Lethem, Elif Batuman, Fiona Maazel, James Wolcott, David Bezmozgis, John D’Agata, Sara Marcus, Meghan O’Rourke, Luc Sante, David Rakoff, Rebecca Solnit and Jeff Sharlet: a small selection of the writers who have signed a letter in support of the Occupy Wall Street Movement.

Alan Hollinghurst Was one of the nominees for the National Book Award in the Young Adult literature category a mistake? Teju Cole brings a “literary horsepower to his tweets that’s a little hard to tease apart with conventional critical methods. For one, his fait divers — which he also calls “small fates” — often deploy an elusive irony or the logic-dazing bluntness of a Zen koan,” Matt Pearce writes at The New Inquiry. What happened to all the sex in Alan Hollinghurst novels? The New York Times runs a hard-hitting review of their executive editor’s new book about puppies:

The floor of the 2010 Frankfurt Book Fair. Twenty finalists have been announced for the 2011 National Book Awards in the fields of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and Young Adult lit. Nominees include Téa Obreht, Jesmyn Ward, and Edith Pearlman for fiction, and Stephen Greenblatt, Manning Marable, and Mary Gabriel for nonfiction. A full list of the finalists is available here. A new British book award, creatively named The Literature Prize, has been created as a result of frustration with the Man Booker Prize. The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh eulogizes his lawyer, and in the process, offers a mini-tutorial in

Renata Adler After being out of print for decades, Renata Adler’s critically acclaimed cult novels Speedboat and Pitch Dark are going to be re-released as New York Review Books classics. Of Adler’s fiction, John Leonard wrote: “Nobody writes better prose than Renata Adler.” The New York Review’s Sara Kramer writes: “We don’t have the books scheduled yet, but they’ll most likely be published at the start of 2013 (it sounds far away but it’s our next available season). We usually talk about the classics series as publishing books that had been forgotten, but the Adler books are a little

A youthful Margaret Atwood. The University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center, which in the past few years has acquired the papers of David Foster Wallace and Denis Johnson, has now bought the papers of J.M. Coetzee, who earned his Ph.D. from UT-Austin in 1969. The Ransom Center will house more than 160 cabinets and boxes of the Nobel Prize winner’s items, including “family photographs, business correspondence, recordings of interviews, notebooks, and early manuscripts for his novels and his autobiography.” Is it journalism? Is it fiction? Does it matter? Jonathan Franzen claims that David Foster Wallace fabricated some—and perhaps most—of

#black|Richard Hell, co-founder of the band Television and one of the musicians who made CBGB famous, has sold his memoirs to Ecco Press, the publisher who recently brought us another memoir by another musician and poet: Patti Smith. According to Ecco, Hell’s book, I Dreamed I was a Very Clean Tramp, will move from his “early days as a struggling writer to the opening of CBGB’s and his subsequent endless nights with the club’s denizens, such as The Ramones, Patti Smith Group, Blondie, and the New York Dolls, to [his] encounters with literary luminaries like Susan Sontag and his relationship

Christopher Hitchens, pre-chemotherapy. Junot Diaz’s next novel will be an reworking of the Superman saga, the Middlebury College student newspaper reports, and instead of setting the superhero in Kansas, he’ll be based in the Dominican Republic, circa 1937. Diaz is also making a few other changes: “the Dominican Superman will actually enslave the world with his powers,” the novelist told students. Economist Felix Salmon explains how new technology lets the New Yorker turn a profit off old content. A little over a year after being diagnosed with cancer, Christopher Hitchens has given up smoking and, more shockingly, alcohol. “Hitchens,

Actors who can’t star in their favorite literary roles are now narrating them instead. Kate Winslet, Nicole Kidman, and Dustin Hoffman are some of the celebrities who will lend their voices to audiobooks. The recordings, which will be released next year by Audible, will feature Winslet reading To the Lighthouse, Kidman reading The End of the Affair, and Hoffman reading Being There. “Colin Firth could read me the back of a Marmite jar and I would listen,” Audible founder Donald Katz remarked to UK paper The Observer. “I’d pay Dustin Hoffman to read from a cereal box.” The Occupy

Young Steve Jobs. Computer games, ghosts, and treasure hunts were three of the highlights of Paul La Farge’s Luminious Airplanes book party, which The Observer describes as something between a “haunted house and a contemporary art installation” Tin House goes digital. At The Awl, Daniel D’Addario close reads photos of Joan Didion (but fails to mention a certain cover image…). Byliner presents eleven profiles of Steve Jobs, in honor of the end of an era; meanwhile, Simon and Schuster has pushed up the release date of its authorized Steve Jobs biography to October 24. Jay Rubin, Haruki Murakami’s longtime

Tomas Tranströmer, from the Nobel website. Getting to know your Nobel Laureate… Late last night on the Scandinavian side of the world, the Nobel Prize Committee awarded the 2011 Prize in Literature to Tomas Tranströmer, making him the first Swede in more than thirty years to win a Nobel. Sweden’s best-known poet and a psychologist specializing in juvenile offenders, Tranströmer made his debut on Sweden’s literary scene when he was just 23 with with his 1954 collection “17 Poems.” Over the next decade, he started to make a name for himself across the Atlantic, befriending poet Robert Bly and

Unnamed poet, with beard. Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, whose work explores “themes of nature, isolation and identity” has won the 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature. Ethan Nosowsky, most recently the editor-at-large of Graywolf Press and formerly of Farrar, Straus and Giroux and the Creative Capital Foundation, is now McSweeney’s editorial director. In honor of the fortieth anniversary of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Zach Baron heads to Sin City in search of Thompson’s ghost. “Writers only go to Las Vegas for one reason, really,” Baron writes in the first of his four-part series. “It is our World Series

Jeff Eugenides, in Times Square. Hypertext fiction was once thought to be the next big thing, but instead it has basically vanished (when is the last time you read a hypertext novel?). Author Paul La Farge, whose new book Luminous Airplanes has an online “hyperromance” component, concludes that the promising medium was killed by bad timing and worse luck: “Born into a world that wasn’t quite ready for it, and encumbered with lousy technology and user-hostile interface design, it got a bad reputation, at least outside of specialized reading circles.” For around fifteen Euros, public writers in France will

Miranda July (Photo credit: Yvan Rodic/FaceHunter). New Yorkers! If you’re not busy occupying Wall Street (or if you are, and need a break) come hear Bookforum editor Chris Lehmann read from his book Rich People Things and share his thoughts on “the predator class” at McNally Jackson tonight at 7. An Italian court has overturned a 26-year prison sentence against Amanda Knox for allegedly murdering her British roommate while on a study-abroad program in Perugia. Knox, who has spent the past four years in prison, hasn’t said what she plans to do next, but according to her family, a

W.G. Sebald Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is being adapted into a movie starring Sandra Bullock and Tom Hanks. It’s set to be released on Christmas Day. Here’s the trailer. In the Times Higher Education supplement, Uwe Schütte, a former student of W.G. Sebald, reflects on Sebald’s tortured relationship to academia, and his final years teaching at the University of East Anglia. What are the odds of Haruki Murakami winning the Nobel Prize for Literature? According to UK betting organization Ladbrookes, 8:1. The winner will be announced on Thursday. A bookstore owner has busted a

Mina Loy Courtney Love is writing a memoir. UK wagering house Ladbrookes guesstimates that Syrian poet Adonis will win this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature. Newsweek talks with Jeffrey Eugenides about his forthcoming novel, The Marriage Plot. The TLS gives some love to overlooked Modernist (and Bookforum favorite) Mina Loy, a writer whose oeuvre T. S. Eliot refused to discuss on the grounds that “her writing was too inconsistent to view as a whole.” High-achieving siblings Alison and Adam Gopnik review Jeffrey Kluger’s The Sibling in this week New York Times’ Book Review. (What, Blake wasn’t available to join?)

Cornel West speaks at the Occupy Wall Street protest in Manhattan. Long-lost books by VS Pritchett, Edith Sitwell, and Alec Waugh (among others) will be back in print soon thanks to Bloomsbury’s new digital publishing imprint, Bloomsbury List. Amazon has upped the ante in the e-reader wars with the Amazon Fire, a tablet that’s positioned to compete with the iPad, but at $199, is roughly half the price. Following Moneyball’s lucrative opening weekend, Warner Brothers has tapped Michael Lewis to adapt Liar’s Poker, his debut book about working on Wall Street in the boom-bust 1980s, into a movie. “I’m