Groucho Marx The legendary literary journal Open City recently released their last issue, but thankfully have an anthology forthcoming—a volume of more than eight-hundred pages of works by essential writers like Sam Lipsyte, Ed Park, Mary Gaitskill, Rivka Galchen, and many more. Meanwhile, No Near Exit, another must-read anthology selected from a decade of Post Road magazine, in which writers pick their favorite pieces, is also in the works—the two books provide essential summer reading, and will surely lead to finding new favorite authors to keep you busy all year long. Groucho Marx in a letter to the heretofore-unknown

Hans Keilson, photo by Jürgen Bauer. Conservative media mogul Glenn Beck is launching an imprint called Mercury Ink with Simon Schuster. On Tuesday, the novelist, child psychologist, and former member of the Dutch Resistance Hans Keilson died at age 101. Last year, he enjoyed a literary revival, with his books Comedy in a Minor Key (published in English for the first time) and Death of an Adversary both hailed as masterpieces. The Believer ran a superb profile of Keilson (by author-translator Damion Searls), which is now available online. n+1 has a new online store, which include digital editions of

Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, is stepping down to be replaced by Washington bureau chief Jill Abramson, the first woman editor of the paper in its history.

Tonight at the poweHouse arena in Brooklyn, the winners of the 2011 Moby Awards will be announced.

Christian Hawkey The Awl has a very entertaining history of “dirty talk” (e.g., vagina, blowjob) at the traditionally squeamish New Yorker. But take note: Contrary to the Awl’s account, the word asshole appeared in that magazine’s pages well before 1994. In an article about Artforum that appeared in the New Yorker’s October 20, 1986 issue, Janet Malcolm quotes art critic Rosalind Krauss, who describes two curators as “sounding like complete assholes.” [Update: The New Yorker has issued a handful of corrections to the Awl’s history: Asshole, it turns out, appeared in 1975; blowjob in 1995.) VIDA has released more

Sylvère Lotringer, photo by Iris Klein. Books or booze? A peek at digital marketing manager Ryan Chapman’s hilarious iPhone auto-correct. Yesterday, the Fales Library at NYU made the Sylvère Lotringer Papers and Semiotext(e) Archive available to researchers. Lotringer is an author, publisher, and social critic widely credited with bringing French theorists such as Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, and Baudrillard to English-language readers. As Fales’s Senior Archivist Lisa Darms says, “Sylvère’s collection could have gone to any number of big league institutions, but by choosing Fales and positioning his archive in the context of our Downtown Collection, he chose to

Remembering Gil Scott-Heron [via Harriet].

Paul Theroux and VS Naipaul at the 2011 Hay Festival, Photo by Daniel Mordzinski from The Telegraph. In a weekend op-ed adapted from Jonathan Franzen’s recent commencement speech at Kenyon college, the novelist and bird-watching enthusiast Franzen suggests that we should put down our BlackBerries and pick up some binoculars. A good woman is hard to find, at least if you’re one of the Esquire staff putting together the “75 books every man should read: An unranked, incomplete, utterly biased list of the greatest works of literature ever published.” The 2008 list (re-posted for the holiday weekend) includes only

Vanessa Veselka Last week when Hugo Lindgren posted Kurt Andersen’s shortlist of annoying “words we don’t say” from his late-90s New York Magazine days (ie “celeb,” eatery,” “hubby”) readers responded with dozens of words and phrases they find irritating. Publishers Weekly picks the big books from BEA, and makes this year’s Expo sound almost retro: “Hardcover fiction is back.” Quirk Books has unleashed sea monsters into Sense and Sensibility and zombies into Pride and Prejudice, but now they’re infesting a book with the most terrifying beast of all. Bedbugs is a novel featuring the nettlesome insects as they haunt

BEA Diary, Part 2. Highlights: Flavor Flav arrives at the Javits Center, wearing a crown. Lisa Pearson, the mastermind behind Siglio Press, gives Bookforum editors two of her Georges Perec-inspired paper airplanes, and reading the detailed Publishers Weekly coverage of the Expo, which seems to be produced instantly and almost makes being at the conference seem unnecessary. Lowlight: Making eye contact with a Scientologist dressed in pirate’s garb. So much time, energy, and money is spent traveling to and attending conferences like BEA, and yet the experience often leaves participants feeling overwhelmed, dissatisfied, and bored. Why do these gatherings

Kate Christensen After taking on the neurotic comedy of Jonathan Ames, HBO is moving on to the harder stuff: The network is planning to air a show written by Sam Lipsyte, author of acerbic, stylish, and deeply felt novels such as The Ask. The “offbeat comedy,” titled People City, will portray the misadventures of a 25-year-old man who is hired by a New York couple to care for their child. In Elle, novelist Kate Christensen explains what it’s like to write from a man’s point of view. BookExpo America Diary, Part One: It’s smaller (duh) and Apple wasn’t around.

Deborah Baker An article in Prospect argues that more bad reviews would result in better books. The good news: the New Yorker is putting out a special issue this week, featuring a decade’s worth of highlights from its “Talk of the Town” column. The bad news: Subscribers won’t receive this issue in the mail. Also: Every single ad in the issue is for shows broadcast on the USA network. The Rumpus online book club recently invited author Deborah Baker to discuss her new book, The Convert, a biography of Maryam Jameelah. Jameelah left America in the late 60s and

Oprah Winfrey posing with her favorite post-apocalyptic beach read. Gary Shteyngart has released the sequel to the popular trailer for his novel Super Sad True Love Story, which has just been published in paperback. In the new video short, Shteyngart and Paul Giamatti “act out their own buddy comedy.” BookExpo America will turn Manhattan into a publishing mecca this week. While the majority of the conferences will be held on Tuesday through Thursday at the Javits Center, there are a slew of events elsewhere in the metropolis all week long. Today, New York Book Week begins with events at

Jon Jon Goulian Stephanie Madoff-Mack is writing a memoir of her experiences with the family of Bernard L. Madoff (she was married to Mark Madoff, who committed suicide after his father’s Ponzi scheme came to light). The book will be published by Blue Rider Press in December. Why did QVC home-shopping channel mogul John Malone offer to buy Barnes and Noble for one billion dollars in cash? It’s an offer that the Wall Street Journal calls “Insane.” Dale Peck explains why authors and readers need to fight the publishing industry as we know it. “It’s time writers thought of

Tonight, a motley assortment of DC rockers and authors will descend upon WORD bookstore in Greenpoint, Brooklyn; Sara Marcus, Michael Kimball, Nathan Larson, and Zach Barocas will tell stories of the nation’s capital.

Richard Nash Adam Rapoport, Hugo Lindgren, Josh Tyrangiel: “Ladies and dudes, meet the Dude-itors.” These editors are “guys who preach a certain carefree editorial attitude.” Laid back as they profess to be, you should think twice before ordering a sparkling wine in their presence. Jess Row has written a take-no-prisoners essay titled “The Novel Is Not Dead,” in which he rails against the “the aristocracy of critics, editors, publishers, and tastemakers” and calls Benjamin Kunkel “dogmatically bigoted.” Those are “fighting words,” says Kunkel in the Comments section. New York Times, the TV show. “Publishing is saddled with this terrible

Philip Roth has won the 2011 Man Booker International Prize. One of the prize’s judges, Carmen Callil, was so underwhelmed by Roth’s work that she quit the judges’ panel after the award was announced, saying that the novelist “goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book. It’s as though he’s sitting on your face and you can’t breathe.”

Chris Adrian, photo by Gus Elliott. Newt Gingrich has become a prolific book critic, penning more than one-hundred-and-fifty reviews in the past decade or so, but you won’t find them in the mainstream papers: He has opted to post his opinions at Amazon.com. At Slate, Dave Weigel attempts to divine Gingrich’s politics from these Amazon reviews. As Weigel writes, the 2012 presidential candidate’s taste for thriller fiction and pop-science is more revealing than the unsurprising party-line political books he likes: “It might not make sense when you hear Gingrich warning of the danger of electro-magnetic pulse attacks or making

James Frey Five years since James Frey made a disastrous appearance on Oprah, a contrite Frey reappeared on the show yesterday afternoon and said what he hoped Oprah wanted to hear: “Whatever happened on that show and with A Million Little Pieces happened because of me. Because I made bad choices,” Frey said, before comparing himself to Celine, Henry Miller, and Jack Kerouac; all authors who are as notable for their “bad choices” as they are for their books. Today, Frey will be back for part two of the interview. In the longstanding battle between Time and Newsweek, Time

The Paris Review’s web editor Thessaly La Force is leaving the magazine for the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Starting in July, The New Yorker’s Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn will become a senior editor of the Paris Review and their blog, the Daily.