Dana Spiotta, photo by Jessica Marx. A Pandora for books? Mashable reports on BookLamp, “A book recommendation engine built on book content and writing style instead of sales data.” With digital technology speeding up the book publication cycle, and fewer copy editors to catch mistakes, Virginia Heffernan says we’re living in an age of typos. Are the books authors are best known for always their best books? Definitely not, argues the The Guardian. With budget cuts looming, the University of California Press will suspend its poetry book series, New California Poetry. Tonight at McNally Jackson Books, novelist Dana Spiotta

Rupert Mudoch hangs his head, via MSNBC It was bring your son to work day in the British Parliament on Tuesday as Rupert and James Murdoch testified in London about the News of the World hacking scandal. Amid rumors that Rupert might be forced to resign as CEO of News International, the eighty-year-old media mogul maintained that he knew nothing of the scope of the misconduct, and gave parliamentarians the ‘bad apple’ excuse, saying that News of the World makes up less than one percent of his 53,000-employee empire. Leaning across his son James, he told the panel, “this

Young Haruki Murakami, via Writers and Kitties Borders has announced plans to liquidate all its remaining stores after negotiations with a private-equity investor collapsed, and they failed to receive any other bids. According to the Wall Street Journal, stores will start closing as soon as Friday, and the chain will go out of business entirely by September. Nearly eleven-thousand people will lose their jobs as a result of the shutdown. Slavoj Zizek dismisses the rumor that he and Lady Gaga are dating, which was started by a group of “anti-authoritarian communists” and picked up by some New York tabloids.

Via The Washington Post Saturday was the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of Catcher in the Rye. To commemorate the event, writer and Salinger scholar Michael Moats contemplates the origins of Holden Caulfield. The Los Angeles Review of Books runs the first segment of Mike Davis’s nine-part biography of Harrison Gray Otis, an early twentieth century newspaper mogul, a “wrathful gargoyle with a walrus moustache and Custer goatee,” and the so-called “inventor” of modern Los Angeles. You probably won’t remember this: Psychologists at Columbia University have found that people are significantly less likely to retain information if they know

James Joyce with Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare and Co. in 1920. Happy 75th birthday, New Directions! Thomas Pynchon’s Manhattan Beach, California duplex is on the market for a cool $1.05 million. FSG wonders if it “smells like weed and genius.” Paris Review editor Lorin Stein sends his staff a postcard from Paris: “My hosts at Shakespeare Co. kindly booked me a room around the corner from the famous shop. Mine is the best room the Hotel Esmeralda has to offer, and one of the highest, smelling faintly but not unpleasantly of blow-dryer and dead mouse. It is five flights

Lecturing on topics one knows nothing about may be a liability for professionals, but for participants in Sheila Heti’s Trampoline Hall lecture series, it’s a requirement. Since late 2001, the monthly Toronto-based talks have been a fixture of the city’s arts scene, inviting speakers to wax poetic on topics ranging from “The Lazy Sociopath” to “Secret Eating” and “Teenage Circumcision.” In honor of the Heti and Misha Glouberman’s new book, The Chairs Are Where the People Go, they’ve taken the series on the road, and will appear tonight for a book-promo-cum-Trampoline-Hall event at the powerHouse Arena in Brooklyn with

Margaret Drabble Will the Bancroft family hold a Eliot Spitzer-style press conference expressing regret for selling the Wall Street Journal to Rupert Murdoch? “It’s sad, but our feud is beyond repair”: Margaret Drabble talks about a lifetime of enmity with her sister A. S. Byatt. Members of the National Book Critics Circle are naming their favorite comic novels, which include Charles Portis’s Masters of Atlantis, Flann O’Brien’s At Swim Two Birds, and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (duh). Our favorite selection: George and Weedon Grossmith’s Diary of a Nobody. Google has announced its first e-reader, the iRiver Story HD, which

The Book Barge, via Flickr After railing against Twitter in the New York Times Magazine, Bill Keller expands his beef with the written word in a new column titled “Let’s Ban Books, or At Least Stop Writing Them.” The gist: too many reporters are taking leave to write books, and Keller’s own failed attempts at book-writing haven’t endeared him to the practice: “Book-writing is agony—slow, lonely, frustrating work that, unless you are a very rare exception, gets a lukewarm review (if any), reaches a few thousand people and lands on a remaindered shelf at Barnes Noble.” Let the Twitter

Via McSweeney’s McSweeney’s debuts its food magazine, Lucky Peach, which features essays by chefs Anthony Bourdain and David Chang, recipes by Wylie Dufresne and Mario Carbone, and art by Tony Millionaire and Scott Teplin. The first issue is dedicated to Ramen, staple of the collegiate food pyramid. The New York Times’s Ravi Somaiya is tweeting from Julian Assange’s trial in London: “Just got—and I am not making this up—a really strong whiff of gin in #Assangecourtroom. Unmistakeable.” For background on the case, check out Ken Silverstein’s Bookforum essay on WikiLeaks as literature. At myunfinishednovel.com, novelists are invited to share

Michael Seidenberg, from Freebird Books It wasn’t corporate bookstores that drove Brazen Head Books underground, but New York City real estate prices. After the secondhand bookstore’s rent quadrupled in 1998, owner Michael Seidenberg took a ten-year hiatus before reopening Brazen Head as an appointment-only shop run out of an unmarked apartment. Since then, Seidenberg, now known as the “secret bookstore guy,” has opened his doors to novelists, bibliophiles, the occasional New Yorker journalist, and, most recently, an Etsy video team, which interviewed Seidenberg and profiled Brazen Head for their blog. Even without business taxes, Seidenberg acknowledges that running a

John Lurie, photo by Sylvia Plachy The New Republic’s Bradford Plumer wonders why British tabloids play so much dirtier than their American counterparts in spite of the UK’s stricter libel laws. A Stolen Life, Jaycee Dugard’s account of eighteen years in captivity with a convicted sex offender, has skyrocketed to the number one bestseller spot on Amazon, a day after her ABC interview drew fifteen million viewers. The editors of the Oxford English Dictionary trace the first use of “OMG” back to a letter written in 1917 by British Admiral John “Jacky” Fisher. A douchebag by any other name?

Wayne Koestenbaum On the heels of its best-of nonfiction roundup—which ended in a tie between Joan Didion and Joan Didion—The New York Times Magazine releases a list of favorite novels as selected by Times staffers. Turns out, the sixth floor’s taste skews to the classics. With Sam Anderson’s blessing, Lolita was crowned the universal favorite, though NYT magazine editor Hugo Lindgren didn’t miss the opportunity to sneak in a DeLillo knock: “I’m sorry, but White Noise is overrated—a great novelist cracking grad-student one-liners.” In a series of new videos, poet-novelist-critic Wayne Koestenbaum, author of a new study of humiliation,

With former spokesman and ex-News of the World editor Andy Coulson arrested, Prime Minister David Cameron pledges to overhaul British media. “I believe we need a new system entirely,” Cameron asserted this morning. Slate media critic Jack Shafer, however, has a different take: “Cameron is trying to make general problem out of too-cozy press-media relations. It’s his specific problem.”

Steve Jobs In April, Simon Schuster announced plans to publish Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography of Steve Jobs tentatively titled iSteve: A Book of Jobs, in 2012. Many people derided the title; now, as Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports, the book has been given a new, no-frills name: Steve Jobs. We wonder if perhaps Simon Schuster had second thoughts because they don’t want to be associated with right-wing blogger Steve Sailer, who goes by the catchy moniker “iSteve” online. In April, Sailer angrily put out a “request for pro bono legal help,” stating, “I shall defend my iSteve brand and intellectual property

Jennifer 8. Lee Blogger, author, cooking show host, and all-around media phenomenon Emily Gould is about to add another role to her ever-expanding repertoire: niche e-book vendor. The Observer reports that Gould and Ruth Curry, the best friend featured in Gould’s 2008 New York Times Magazine cover story, are discussing launching an imprint with OR Books. EmilyBooks.com is described as a “curated site” that will carry “a small number of hand-selected books.” According to an email Gould sent to OR co-founder John Oakes: “Our goal is to be super-specialized and targeted and to build an audience that trusts us.”

Michael Kimball, author of the deeply sad novel, Dear Everybody, and a master of the micro-biography, has sold his new novel, Big Ray, to Bloomsbury. In The Believer’s music issue, historian Paul Collins recounts the golden era of cars equipped with record players, including this description of Chrysler’s harrowing road-test: “Horn-rimmed execs swapped records in and out of the player as the auto giant’s president wildly drove a car over a torture-track of cobblestone, speed bumps, and washboard test strips . . . . [The] player performed perfectly, and the car swung into the test garage with music swelling

Jarvis Cocker French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn faces allegations of attempted rape from French novelist Tristane Banon just days after a case against Strauss-Kahn for sexual misconduct with a hotel maid seemed to disintegrate. Brit-pop singer Jarvis Cocker has a new book, Mother, Brother, Lover, being published this fall by Faber Faber. Cocker, known for his epic and sultry evocations of everyday life in songs such as “Common People,” talks with Faber publisher Lee Brackstone about writing lyrics, and how falling out of a window led to a lyrical breakthrough. In her eloquent New York Times review of Chester Brown’s

Alan Hollinghurst South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, a “Tea Party politician on the rise,” has signed a book deal with Sentinel, which will publish her memoir Can’t Is Not an Option: My Story in January 2012. The Guardian details the disastrous results of the recently announced Booker Prize, which columnist (and Wodehouse biographer) Robert McCrum calls a “car crash.” Meanwhile, another one of Britain’s literary awards, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, has been suspended. The Rest Is Noise author Alex Ross has been documenting his visit to Italy, including his trip to Venice’s San Michel cemetery, where he pays

Dorothy Parker Was Shakespeare a stoner? Oxford ditches the comma, deeply annoying the spirit of David Foster Wallace. “[Wallace] is the only writer ever to convince (or even try to convince) the famously stubborn Times copy desk that we should temporarily ignore the paper’s famous serial-comma rule—the paper doesn’t use them; this really drove David nuts.” Chris Suellentrop quits NYT Magazine to join Yahoo News. On July 2, the Publication Studio is throwing a “collaborative event” at the Brooklyn Grange Farm, “a zero chemical input commercial urban farm located on a New York City rooftop.” Penguin goes iTunes classics.

Simon Reynolds Members of the Village Voice’s union shop are prepared to strike if a new contract with company management is not agreed upon by midnight on Thursday. We doubt it will come to that (Voice contract negotiations have historically involved threats of a strike), but if it does, the union says that it will launch an alternative website. In Chicago, retired engineer Malcolm O’Hagan is planning the American Writers Museum. The city has a long literary history, with authors such as Ernest Hemingway, Saul Bellow, and Raymond Chandler calling the windy city home, as well as hosting contemporary