Christian Bale in American Pyscho Philip Levine is our new Poet Laureate. A former employee of the Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, Connecticut, has confessed to embezzling over $1 million from the author’s estate. While many authors’ homes are under financial duress, the LA Times notes, most “are not systematically plundered.” Big British book chains are closing stores early as riots spread across London. You’ll never get a table at Dorsia, but the Harvard Club, Indochine, and the Four Seasons still take reservations: A New York City movie scout rounds up the real-life locations featured in American

Albert Camus, via The Guardian Baltimore’s Edgar Allen Poe house has lost public funding and may soon have to close; that is, unless a series of Poe-inspired movies (John Cusack in ‘The Raven,’ anyone?) can help revive the late author’s legacy. Today in conspiracy theories: Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera claims that the car crash that killed Albert Camus might have been orchestrated by the KGB in order to stop the Algerian intellectual from finishing a book critical of the Soviet Union. Is it sexist or just offensive? Michele Bachmann says she still hasn’t seen Newsweek’s controversial new cover,

Electric Literature reviews “The Waste Land” iPad app. The Awl breaks down the case of 24-year-old hacktivist Aaron Swartz, who was indicted last July for taking nearly 5 million JSTOR documents off an MIT laptop and releasing them into the public domain. Melville House is planning to launch what it calls HybridBooks—books with barcodes that, when scanned with smart phones, will allow readers to access supplementary material called “illuminations.” Bartleby the Scrivener will come outfitted with 19th-century maps of Wall Street and recipes for ginger nuts (a Melvillean favorite?). According to publisher Dennis Loy Johnson, the hybrid edition of

We were sad to learn today that Agota Kristof died on July 27. Born in 1935, the Hungarian author, who spent her adult life in Switzerland, wrote the Book of Lies, a shape-shifting trilogy about two brothers living in Europe who are separated during World War II. Shape-shifting and grippingly taut, brain-teasing and fairy-tale simple, confident yet horrific, it’s a landmark in contemporary European and experimental fiction.

Nicholson Baker, the Santa Claus of smut, via Simon and Schuster. With the advent of e-books, authors now have more opportunity than ever to revise and republish previous books. So will they? The Boston Globe’s Alex Beam poses the question to John Banville and Tom Perrotta, among others. Journalist-turned-novelist Tony Parsons has been named Heathrow Airport’s second writer-in-residence. He’ll spend a week at the airport and will publish a short story collection based on the experience this October. A Powell’s Books clerk takes to the pages of the Chicago Tribune to exhort publishers to fight back—and fight dirty—against the

Bret Easton Ellis, via Brooklyn Vol. 1 Embrace hyperbole, and steal jargon from other professions—Darryl Campbell offers some advice for making book reviews sound less generic. In honor of the temporary debt ceiling resolution, The Guardian runs a quiz about debt in literature. Bret Easton Ellis, the author of the satire-slash-horror novel Lunar Park, and Paul Schrader, the screenwriter who brought you Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, are teaming up to produce a “shark-infested psychological horror” movie called Bait. (On a related note: at htmlgiant, Blake Butler writes an excellent meditation on the “humanity” of Ellis’s American Psycho, which

Jorge Luis Borges in Buenos Aires The love that dare not write its name? Alex Ross examines how multiple versions of The Picture of Dorian Gray “show Wilde deciding, sentence by sentence, just how far he would go” in his depiction of homosexual love. Exciting news for literary procrastinators: Borges’s 1967-1968 Harvard Norton lectures are now available online. Nearly completely blind at the time—he could only see yellow, “the color of the tiger”—Borges delivered the talks (which were nominally about poetry, generally about literature, translation and memory) without the assistance of aide-mémoires. A letter attributed to Lord Byron in

Morrissey, super-hero: a still from a potential comic book series based on the Smiths frontman. Longtime Los Angeles Times book critic Richard Rayner is moving his column to the scrappier (and, for now, online-only) Los Angeles Review of Books. The American Scholar publishes ‘The New Generation,’ a previously un-translated story by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. “The concept is pretty simple,” says the creator of a forthcoming anthology of comics inspired by The Smiths: “What’s the story that plays in your head when you listen to your favorite Smiths song?” With Atavist, Byliner, and other long-form publishing platforms coming into vogue, the

Paul Auster Longshot—a publication that corrals “thousands of writers, editors, artists, photographers, programmers, videographers, and other creatives from all around the world” to put together a magazine in 48 hours—has released its second issue, on debt. How similar is literary writing to the spoken vernacular? Ben Zimmer goes digging through the Corpus of Contemporary American English to come up with an answer. Filmmaker Terry Gilliam is working on an adaptation of Paul Auster’s novel Mr. Vertigo. Despite the demands of higher education and anxiety about the internet, Alan Jacobs argues that “serious ‘deep attention’ reading has always been and

George Plimpton and Mr. Puss, the cat. Does the term “advertorial” (a collision between “advertising” and “editorial”) seem less off-putting when applied to books? The Staff Recommends, a publisher-backed books site spearheaded by members of McSweeneys and the Morning News, hopes so. A Kickstarter campaign to finance a documentary about Paris Review editor George Plimpton (titled Plimpton!) is gathering momentum. With 28 days left to go, filmmakers have raised more than half of the $25,000 needed to pay for archival footage. Unbound, the “Kickstarter for books,” works by allowing members to propose a book idea, then letting the internet

Susan Sontag, the David Wu of her time. Photo by Annie Leibovitz The Los Angeles Times has laid off all of its freelance book reviewers. ThinkProgress blogger Matt Yglesias has signed a deal with Simon Schuster to write a “relatively short relatively cheap e-book” on housing policy: The Rent is Too Damn High. In the August issue of Vanity Fair, Dave Eggers chats with Maurice Sendak about Bumble-Ardy, the first book that Sendak has written and illustrated in over three decades. Queried by The Observer about her contribution to soon-to-launch zine Girl Crush (a publication in which ladies air

A remembrance of our much-missed colleague, Clara Heyworth, marketing manager of Verso Books.

Chantal Akerman, courtesy of the San Francisco MoMA Carrie Kania has left her post as publisher of Harper Perennial to become an agent at Conville Walsh in London. According to GalleyCat, “her departure also sparked a reorganization,” but we hope the Harper Collins inprint won’t lose its current sensibility. Publishing books by the likes of Kevin Sampsell, Blake Butler, and Justin Taylor, Harper Perennial has become one of the most adventurous major publishers out there. In addition to veteran fiction writers Alan Hollinghurst and Julian Barnes, four first-time novelists made this year’s Man Booker Prize longlist. Should novelists moonlight

Tonight, Bookforum co-editor and poet Albert Mobilio will read from his new book, Touch Wood, at the annual Poets House Showcase with Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Jena Osman, and Evie Shockley.

Nicholson Baker After writing twelve columns and chalking up a 41.6 percent correction rate, Bill Keller is giving up his much-lambasted New York Times Magazine column. The Guardian publishes its top-twelve picks for this year’s Booker Prize. The Atlantic has posted part of its summer fiction issue, featuring stories and essays by Ariel Dorfman, Wendell Berry, and John Barth, among others. The Awl presents some mini-excerpts from Nicholson Baker’s soon-to-be-published sex-saturated novel, House of Holes. Young adult novelist John Green proves that if you have enough Twitter followers, your book doesn’t even need to be finished before hitting the

Werner Herzog, years before meeting with comparatively tame fans at Comic—Con. Werner Herzog was spotted at Comic-Con: “I have never seen the collective dreams all in one place,” he remarked. Mental Floss rounds up the fifteen of the best words with no English equivalent, including ‘gumusservi’ (Turkish for moonlight shining on water), ‘kummerspeck’ (German for weight gained by emotional overeating; literally translates to ‘bacon grief’), and ‘slampadato,’ the Italian term for tanning-bed addiction. The Guardian complains that straightforward facts are ruining history books. Novelist Jeffrey Eugenides’s read at the Paris Review offices on Thursday with a black eye and

We’re deeply excited about “Reading Life,” a new weekly column in the New York Times by “world-class noticer” Geoff Dyer.

By Peter Stackpole, from a 1953 Life Magazine spread. He might not be the writer we want, but is Tao Lin the writer the digital generation deserves? The New Yorker’s Book Bench flags the emergence of ‘hipster lit’ as a bookstore category, and wonders, rightly, where the women writers are. Saul Bellow, Anthony Burgess, and Tobias Wolff all have first novels that are best forgotten, but among the three, Wolff has gotten closest to scrubbing his debut effort, Ugly Rumours, from publishing history, Elon Green writes at The Awl. Britain’s House of Lords launches an inquiry into how the

Noted YA author Ayn Rand, courtesy of The Wit Continuum Media used to be full of moguls, but no longer: The Economist opines that Rupert Murdoch is “the last member of a dying breed.” The Hangover star Bradley Cooper gets cast as Lucifer in a new film adaptation of “Paradise Lost.” Why was Ayn Rand such a bestseller? “Because she writes the best children’s literature in America,” former editor Patrick O’Connor told The Millions’ Gary Percesepe. “The Fountainhead is practically a rite of passage for alienated youth. She writes these epic, Wagnerian things. Where the sex takes place on

Joseph Heller, via Epic Black Car At The Guardian, Jim Crace surveys the history of phone hacking in literature. New York magazine argues that one of the main characters in Jeff Eugenides’s forthcoming novel The Marriage Plot (which we’ll all be hearing plenty about over the next several months) is modeled on David Foster Wallace. A lesbian couple is asked to stop holding hands—at a Gertrude Stein exhibition in San Francisco. As British Prime Minister David Cameron comes under attack for his ties to the Murdoch empire, News International stock enjoyed an upward bounce Tuesday thanks to Rupert’s testimony