Both ways is the only way they want it: After helping put who knows how many others out of business, Amazon open their own physical bookstore.

For the New York Times magazine, Parul Sehgal profiles Mary Gaitskill, whose new novel, The Mare, is reviewed in the next issue of Bookforum. In person, Sehgal describes her as “wary in the way of habitually truthful people trying to stay out of trouble. . . . She feels misunderstood, which, of course, she is.” No easy feat to interview a writer who specializes in evoking “the hidden life, the life unseen, the life we don’t even know we are living.”

ESPN has pulled the plug on its sports, pop-culture, and news website Grantland. This comes about a month after editors Sean Fennessey, Juliet Litman, Mallory Rubin, and Chris Ryan left Grantland to work on an unknown project led by Grantland founder Bill Simmons. Many have mourned the loss of the site. As for ESPN, the company itself did not seem have its heart in Grantland: “We're getting out of the pop culture business," a senior ESPN source told CNN.

Howard Sounes’s biography of Lou Reed was released in the UK on October 22. Reed was always considered to be cantankerous, difficult,

Raif Badawi, the Saudi blogger imprisoned for the past few years and soon to be flogged again as part of his sentence, has been awarded the European Union’s Sakharov prize for human rights.

This week in conflicts of interest: There seems to be some disagreement as to whether it’s acceptable to assign a piece on tech entrepreneurs, including Airbnb, to a writer whose husband is one of Airbnb’s biggest investors. T magazine’s Deborah Needleman tells New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan she doesn’t regret commissioning Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, though perhaps there ought to have been

For those who couldn’t bear to watch, CNN names “winners and losers” in last night’s Republican presidential debate.

In the age of the internet, your juvenilia often comes back to haunt you. So you’re well placed to sympathize with Truman Capote, whose stories for his high-school newspaper, after languishing for years in the archives of the New York Public Library, are now reappearing for all to see.

A bit of glory for writers is always welcome: You may not have known, but yesterday was proclaimed Marlon James Day by both the mayor of Minneapolis and the governor of Minnesota, in honor of

20 percent nicer,’” as Re/Code puts it, they’ve picked one of their old guard, Alex Pareene, former editor of Wonkette and a survivor of First Look Media’s ill-fated Racket. John Cook, Gawker Media’s executive editor, proclaimed his excitement that Pareene would take over in time to make the most of a 2016 presidential race that “promises to be nothing short of a terrifying circus.”

Vox and Buzzfeed have seemingly helped embarrass the SXSW festival’s organizers into reinstating and expanding its planned discussions about online harassment (which they’d tried to cancel after a brief burst of

Lisa Jardine, “the leading British female public intellectual of our times,” is the subject of an impressive and very moving collaborative obituary that honors her as a scholar, teacher, and friend: She showed “generations of women who came after her that it was both possible to succeed at work and at many other things as well.”

The Dominican Consul General has stripped the writer Junot Díaz of his Order of Merit award for speaking out against what the Dominican Republic has been doing to Haitians and those of Haitian descent.

PEN’s website has hosted an unusually thoughtful and detailed

Why did Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign recently pay HarperCollins $122,252.62? According to the New Republic, the candidate (whose literary agent, Keith Urbahn, was Donald Rumsfeld’s chief of staff) was probably buying up copies of his new book, A Time for Truth. (The bulk purchases led the Times to leave the book off of its best-seller list.) He’s not the only candidate who is boosting his own sales: Earlier this year Ben Carson spent $150,000 buying up copies of his book A More Perfect Union, the centerpiece of his recent author tour.

Harriet Klausner—a former librarian who wrote more than

Paul West, the novelist and critic (and former Bookforum “First Novels” columnist), has died. “As a stylist,” the New York Times notes in its obituary, he “pulled out most if not all the stops” in books whose protagonists might be astronauts or aliens, Jack the Ripper or von Stauffenberg (who gave his name to the plot against Hitler). “The impulse here,” West wrote in his 1985 vindication of purple prose, “is to make everything larger than life, almost to overrespond, maybe because, habituated to life written down, in both senses, we become inured and have to be awakened with something almost

Who wouldn’t want to eavesdrop on a conversation between Alexander Chee and Eileen Myles? But this one especially seems designed to cheer the rest of us up: “I feel there’s a revolution going on,” Myles says, “like the road saga of the 50s and 60s for boys might be writing poetry for females right now. And I just love how poetry seems to be totally. . . the notebook is open—girls, and girlboys, young people and older people and all kinds of people are writing in it. Something special, mortal, cheap and fun, a new way of being smart and fast—it coincides with texting, and social media—it’s a

Responding to what he calls Kathryn Schulz’s “devastation of Thoreau’s character, style, and mental health” in her latest New Yorker essay (which is also fun to read: “No feature of the natural landscape is more humble than a pond,” she writes, “but, on the evidence of Thoreau, the quality is not contagious”), Jedediah Purdy mounts a spirited defense of “a genuine American weirdo.”

Futuristically enough, we’ll all soon be able to experience New York Times stories through virtual reality.

Meanwhile, Twitter has hired a Times editor at large as editorial director of its currently-not-compelling-enough

Behold a small parable of journalism and the workplace in the twenty-first century. Amazon’s spokesman (that’s Jay Carney, ex-White House Press Secretary to you) says on Medium that Amazon is much nicer than the New York Times would have you think, and that the Times reporters got one of their most colorful quotes, about Amazonians weeping at their desks, from an untrustworthy, disgruntled former employee who’d been caught perpetrating a fraud. The Times’s executive editor (also on Medium) stands by the story, in detail, and notes that, “Several other people in other divisions also described

The Evergreen Review, the legendary literary publication that is currently being revived by Dale Peck and John Oakes, is throwing a party at Le Poisson Rouge on November 2. The event will be emceed by Peck, and will feature Heather Abel, Calvin Baker, Alex Chee, Mark Doten, and John Keene. There will be “literary outrages, parodies of beloved icons, and a performance/happening.” They are making it clear that this will be no ordinary literary event: “No readings!” 

The New York Times reports that David Lynch will write, with the help of journalist Kristine McKenna, a memoir-biography hybrid