Aaron Swartz, the 24-year-old hacker indicted on data theft charges for leaking JSTOR documents, courtesy of ragesoss After a 24-year-old hacker was indicted for leaking over 5 million JSTOR documents online, JSTOR has partially lifted its paywall and made all of its 500,000 out-of-copyright journal articles free worldwide. Capital New York rounds up the books that hip New Yorkers will be ostentatiously reading on the subway this fall. Read about a number of them—including Jeff Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot, Joan Didion’s Blue Nights, and Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding—in our fall issue. Amazon is reportedly testing a new,

Patrick DeWitt Odds are on Julian Barnes to win the Man Booker Prize this year for his novel, The Sense of an Ending. But we’re betting on dark horse candidate Patrick DeWitt; though he’s facing steep 8-to-1 odds, we thought his neo-Western The Sisters Brothers was dark, hilarious, and oddly heartfelt. Note to novelists: Don’t pitch your book this week. Former Slate media critic Jack Shafer has found a new home at Reuters, where he’ll join Felix Salmon in the Opinion section. Salmon, meanwhile, just launched Counterparties, a curated news site that lets readers consume Salmon’s news diet by

Chad Harbach, author of The Art of Fielding In February, Melville House will reissue Renata Adler’s long-out-of-print Speedboat and Pitch Dark, reminding us that Adler, now best known for trashing her New Yorker colleague Pauline Kael, was also a formidable novelist and stylist. Reviewing Speedboat, John Leonard wrote: “Nobody in this country writes better prose than Renata Adler’s.” n+1 editor Chad Harbach’s anticipated debut novel, The Art of Fielding has received rave reviews from Judith Shulevitz at Slate and Michiko Kakutani at The New York Times. The Guardian has published a short work of fiction by Geoff Dyer, in

Citing concerns over “office space,” the Washington Post has announced plans to close nine of their eleven regional bureaus sparing only the Virginia and Annapolis newsrooms. At the Nieman Journalism Lab, Maria Bustillos and David Roth debate whether David Foster Wallace “prefigured the voice of blogs,” shaping how people write online. Russia’s richest man and former Yukos oil CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky has begun writing prison dispatches: “Khodorkovsky begins his column with the grisly tale of Kolya, who disembowelled himself and threw his intestines at guards for being set up for a crime he did not commit: grabbing a purse

Lawrence Wright, author of a New Yorker profile of ex-Scientologist Paul Haggis. Too soon? Qaddafi has been out of power for less than two weeks, but Salon has already asked eight writers to fictionalize his fall. A new study finds that positive words outrank negative ones in the English language. “The New Yorker, What a Load of Balderdash!” say Scientologists who are handing out anti-New Yorker pamphlets outside of the magazine’s headquarters. The protesters are pointing interested parties to a long expose on the Church’s website, which claims that during the exhaustive fact-checking process of the New Yorker’s February

Christopher Hitchens’ new book of essays, Arguably, has just been released. Only five people showed up at a Naples, Florida book event for Christine O’Donnell. France is finally getting book blurbs. Introducing the (fake) n+1 personals: “Brooklyn wiseass, 24, delusions of grandeur and mild egomania. Eager to tell you about his novel and his perfect GRE score.” NPR considers the art of imitating dead writers on Twitter. The New York Times’ RD department is at work on the next generation media reader: “a giant touchscreen that lets the whole clan read and share right from their furniture.” Vanity Fair

Demand for Madonna’s out-of-print book proves that “Sex” still sells. Last week, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals reversed an $18 million settlement in favor of freelance writers who had had their work published online without “permission or compensation.” Andrew Albanese breaks down what this could mean for freelancers, and how the latest ruling in Tasini v. New York Times is likely to affect writers in the digital age. How “The End of the Line for the Euro,” a 12-part fictional series in Le Monde, caused financial panic in the UK. Bibliophiles love to reflect on the effect books

Haruki Murakami After parents complained of a scene depicting a “drug-fuelled, homosexual orgy,” tenth graders at Williamstown High School in New Jersey will no longer have Haruki Murakami’s classic, Norwegian Wood, on their summer reading list. Dick Cheney’s forthcoming memoir is already making people angry. Meanwhile, the CIA is “demanding extensive cuts” in former FBI agent Ali H. Soufan’s forthcoming memoir about American intelligence and the September 11 attacks. Geoff Dyer reads books, picks nose. Katie Rophie talks with Nicholson Baker about House of Holes, his latest “book of raunch:” “Things are in this book because I found them

Lewis Lapham’s desk, via FSG Work in Progress David Rakoff, Mike Birbiglia and Rick Reilly are among the finalists for the 2011 Thurber Prize for American humor writing. Salon wonders why Obama isn’t reading more female authors. Greenwich Village poet Samuel Menashe died at his home in Manhattan on Monday at the age of 85. Menashe was known for his “short verse” poems, which sometimes ran only four lines long. Curious about what Lewis Lapham’s library looks like? Sad times at Slate: The online magazine lays off longtime media critic Jack Shafer, foreign editor June Thomas, associate editor Juliet

The Moviergoer author Walker Percy. Graphic novelist James Sturm investigates how difficult it is to get a cartoon into the New Yorker by submitting ninety of them. The Believer interviews Ben Lerner about his excellent debut novel, Leaving the Atocha Station. (You can read an excerpt of the book here). Stephen King is getting his own Maine-based radio show. “We wanted to shake things up a little bit in the market,” he explains to the Bangor Daily News. The Millions runs an homage to Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer on its fiftieth birthday. Perhaps looking to outdo Rick Moody’s latest

A Sport and A Pastime author James Salter. Booktrack, a New York-based startup, is adding soundtracks to e-books. Among the books it will score with music are The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Jane Eyre, Romeo and Juliet, and The Three Musketeers. Simon Schuster has signed a book deal with John Locke, the only self-published author ever to sell a million Kindle e-books. Locke is the author of the Donovan thriller series, and has published a self-help book of sorts: How I Sold 1 Million eBooks in 5 Months! The “essential consideration” of Allan Hollinghurst’s writing is Englishness, Nakul Krishna

Joan Didion, looking nonplussed. What the president’s reading: While on vacation with his family in Martha’s Vineyard, Obama was spotted carrying Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Emma Donoghue’s Room, and The Bayou Trilogy, by Winter’s Bone author Daniel Woodrell. Citing Chad Harbach’s $650,000 advance, New York magazine trumpets the return of big first book deals. Dan Rather’s memoir, Summing Up, will be out next spring. Vanessa Redgrave is going to narrate the audiobook for Joan Didion’s forthcoming memoir, Blue Nights. “‘Wittol’—a man who tolerates his wife’s infidelity;” “‘cyclogiro,’ a type of aircraft propelled by rotating blades;” and “‘alienism,’ the

Slavoj Žižek Book sales are falling, but comics (especially high-end collections) are doing better than ever. Michigan-based indie publisher Dzanc Books has created a new prize for mid-career writers. The winner (to be announced after the February 1 deadline) gets a $1,000 advance and publication with Dzanc in 2013. James Patterson is the world’s highest-paid writer, but Stephenie Meyer and Stephen King aren’t doing too badly, according to a new Forbes list. Slavoj Zizek considers the meaning of the London riots: “The fact that the rioters have no programme . . . tells us a great deal about our

Gerhard Steidl Another alt weekly announces its demise: the New York Press goes under. Incoming freshmen at Duke and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, are spending their summer reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals; first-years at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C., are learning about Mexico’s Tarahumara distance runners via Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run; and come September, new Cornell students will discuss Homer Langley, E. L. Doctorow’s novel about “two infamous packrats who were found dead in their Harlem brownstone in 1947 surrounded by more than 100 tons of accumulated stuff.” In honor of National Bad

Philip Glass, via Chester Novello Philip Glass has signed a deal with Norton to publish his memoirs. A Mississippi court has thrown out a lawsuit by Ablene Cooper, a former maid who claimed she was the basis for Kathryn Stockett’s book The Help. Prompted by chatter about Camus’ mysterious, purportedly KGB-ordained death, the New Yorker’s Richard Brody revisits the history of car crashes in French cinema. But who will play Mapplethorpe? Playwright and screenwriter John Logan is adapting Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids into a movie. Amazon has signed self-help author Timothy Ferriss—author of The 4-Hour Body and The

Mike Albo, author of The Junket Bookforum excerpts The Junket, Mike Albo’s excellent Kindle Single about the travails of being a freelancer in New York: “If you haven’t been to Manhattan in the last ten years, you should know that it no longer trades in durable, fungible goods except for artisanal cheese and celebrity cupcakes. These days, the city is a marketplace of intangible ideas and the internet efforts that promulgate them. Now people make millions by crowd-sourcing, aggregating and hedging funds.” N+1 editor Chad Harbach’s novel The Art of Fielding is weeks away from hitting shelves, but it’s

Harold Bloom A Facebook group titled “I Hate Reading” has 442,551 (and counting) more supporters than it should. Abe Books responds with a “We Hate the I Hate Reading Page” video. As if writers didn’t have enough to stress about, a new Amazon feature called Author Central lets authors check their print sales figures by city and region. Tom Perrotta’s forthcoming novel about being left behind after the Rapture has already been optioned for an HBO series. The Leftovers will come out with St. Martin’s Press at the end of the month. “I met you in a Chinese restaurant

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s home in Salem, Massachusetts. David Orr, who spends most of his journalism dough writing about poetry, has weighed in on the rise of fantasy novels, and on why George R. R. Martin dominates the New York Times bestseller list. Did you know you can share books on Google+? You can. The Los Angeles Times’ Jacket Copy blog explains. April Bernard joins a slowly growing group of authors—which includes Laura Miller and Brock Clarke—who have meditated on the phenomenon of the writer’s houses as tourist destination. Bernard hates it, or at least the idea “that art can be

(Dr.) Theodor Seuss Geisel, and the Cat in the Hat. British looters are leaving bookstores untouched: “Books are losing out to high-end jeans and Apple-made gadgets,” The Economist reports. New York’s Steven Kasher gallery celebrates the aesthetic of punk with Rude and Reckless—an exhibit dedicated to “punk and post-punk graphics.” Book cover designer Chip Kidd writes, “the historic influences are abundant and cleverly re-invented: Russian Constructivism for Kraftwerk’s The Man Machine; Chinese propaganda for The Clash’s Sandinista, and “the decadence of the Weimar Republic for Lou Reed’s Rock ‘n Roll Animal,” among others. A new lawsuit accuses Apple of

Philip Levine, our newest Poet Laureate Are they ‘protestors,’ ‘looters,’ or ‘rioters?’ The Guardian parses the vocabulary of the UK riots. Philip Levine is the right poet for our troubled times, Dwight Garner opines: “the work of Philip Levine, America’s new and 18th poet laureate, is welcome because it radiates a heat of a sort not often felt in today’s poetry, that transmitted by grease, soil, factory light, cheap and honest food, sweat, low pay, cigarettes and second shifts. It is a plainspoken poetry ready-made, it seems, for a time of SP downgrades, a double-dip recession and debts left