Ron Silliman The schedule for the 2011 PEN World Voices festival has been posted. Poet Ron Silliman is ending his influential blog after an eight-year run (though he leaves the possibility of returning open). Silliman writes, “what was once the newest thing on the block has by now become normative, even predictable. Blogs continue to have their uses, but in web time nothing stands still as a form,” writing that he plans to spend more time on his own writing, and using Twitter to share links; if you’re following him there, prepare for a deluge of updates. What is

Suzan-Lori Parks The Onion offers some much-needed perspective on the debate over the New York Times’s pay wall. At the New York Review blog, Robert Darnton gives six reasons for the “failure” of Google Books. One of the most engrossing sections of the new Paris Review is a portfolio of collages curated by Pavel Zoubok, whose New York gallery is solely dedicated to cut-and-paste art. At the Review’s Daily blog, senior editor David Wallace-Wells interviews Zoubok, who notes the works’ affinity with poetry: “Collage is an inherently literary medium. It’s associative, and collagists use images and objects to produce

Lisa Dierbeck As Borders goes bankrupt, its top executives may get big bonuses. The Financial Times profiles Mischief + Mayhem, a writer’s collective including novelists Dale Peck and Lisa Dierbeck (among others) who plan to bypass Amazon and Barnes and Noble, and reach readers through OR Books and some independent bookstores. Ayelet Waldman tweeted a screed about Katie Roiphe: “Really Roiphe? You seek ‘slightly greater obsession w/ the sublime sentence.’ My husband’s sentences are INFINITELY more sublime than yours.” (etc.) The New York Observer is calling it a battle “with no winners,” which is actually a fair description of

Jenny Erpenbeck Japanese publishers, after the quake. As the New York Times’s pay-wall looms, Times fans accustomed to reading online for free are trading slightly panicked queries: If you’re a weekend subscriber, do you get online access? If you pay, can you read articles from more than one computer? And WHY OH WHY ARE THEY DOING THIS? The Times has enlisted Paul Smurl, “vice president for paid products,” to provide chipper answers to all of your digital subscription Qs. Meanwhile, Gawker offers a profile of the people planning to defy the pay wall. As the Times’s publisher Arthur “Pinch”

Oe The Baffler returns! The seminal magazine of culture and politics—which was founded by Thomas Frank in 1988—has often been plagued by intermittent outages (even a disastrous office fire in 2001) and has been “on hiatus” since last fall. But in a tweet yesterday morning, the publication told subscribers to “hang on!”: It will have a new print issue later this year, and new online content soon. The man who wrote Elizabeth Taylor’s New York Times obituary actually died in 2005. In the New Yorker, the Nobel-winning novelist Kenzaburo Oe writes of the dangers of nuclear power: “This disaster

Roberto Bolaño Yesterday, the Google Books settlement was rejected by Federal judge Denny Chin. What is Google’s next step? In Ishinomaki, a Japanese town wrecked by the earthquake and tsunami, reporters published their newspaper using felt-tip markers and large sheets of paper, as all other technology had failed. A recently penned headline: “We Now Know the Full Extent of the Damage.” The New York Review of Books blog has published an essay by the late Roberto Bolaño about the books he remembered best, such as Camus’s The Fall: “I read it, devoured it, by the light of those exceptional

Madison Smartt Bell In the latest entry in Bomb magazine’s engrossing “Fiction for Driving Across America” series, Madison Smartt Bell reads from his bewitching novel The Color of Night. Where have we heard that argument for e-books before? Tick a square on the Electronic Publishing Bingo Card every time someone spouts a (usually false) truism such as “printing is the most costly part of publishing.” Did we hear someone yell “Bingo!”? Literary-minded New Yorkers will wish they could be in three places at once tonight, as there is a trio of stellar events in the city. First up, McNally

James Carroll, photo by Patricia Pingree Colson Whitehead’s forthcoming postapocalyptic book, Zone One, is a zombie novel. From CBS News, a video profile of Benedikt Taschen, the print book publisher flourishing by creating luxe volumes in lean times. At PWxyz, Laura Miller has some intriguing insights into the current state of book reviewing, especially the oft-debated question of the purpose of panning a book: “It’s bad when an author gets a bad review he or she doesn’t deserve, but it’s bad for the overall ecology of book reviews, if a reviewer gives a book an unduly positive review. It

Former CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson has signed a deal with Penguin Group to write a series of international spy novels.

Sasha Grey Is the era of free content coming to an end? After yesterday’s announcement that the New York Times pay-wall was finally happening, came a press release from the Newspaper Guild urging unpaid bloggers at the Huffington Post to withhold their writing in solidarity with a strike by the Visual Arts Source, a writer’s organization who are refusing to provide free work. Mary Ellen Bute’s mid-sixties film adaptation, Passages from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (with subtitles, natch), is available on Ubu Web and is an exceedingly odd retro romp, and a pleasure to watch, though we don’t recommend

The great experiment in charging for once free web content begins: The New York Times’s long-rumored pay-wall plan was announced today. Beginning on March 28, readers will be able to access twenty articles a month before the Times starts charging, with various e-subscription plans available (an all-access plan will cost $35). Subscribers to the print edition will have free access to all online articles.

Mina Pam Dick Jonathan Franzen didn’t win the NBCC award in fiction, but his picture still illustrated the LA Times story reporting that Jennifer Egan had won the prize (they later changed it). Was this slip-up sinister or sincere? Most importantly, is it fodder for more Franzenfreude? The Times explains. The Paris Review has an excerpt from Edouard Leve’s forthcoming Autoportrait, a book Leve wrote while traveling in the US in 2002 taking photographs and musing on, well, absolutely everything. “There are times in my life when I overuse the phrase ‘it all sounds pretty complicated,’” he writes. And:

Deborah Eisenberg Publishers Weekly has posted the first review of David Foster Wallace’s posthumously published unfinished novel, The Pale King. Deborah Eisenberg has won the 2011 PEN/Faulkner Award for her Collected Stories, a compilation of a quarter century of first-rate fiction. Have you ever wondered what it is like to be edited by the top-flight professionals at the Washington Post? Yesterday, the Post accidentally uploaded a version of a story with ALL CAPS EDITOR NOTES (and typos) included. A new website, Churnalism, can detect the difference between original journalism and regurgitated copy from press releases. Tonight, performance art legend

Maura Johnston Critic David L. Ulin on nine literary earthquake books, including Haruki Murakami’s collection of stories, After the Quake, written after the 1995 Kobe earthquake: “Although in many of the pieces here the disaster plays only a peripheral part, it reverberates throughout the book like an aftershock.” Novelist Marie Mutsuki Mockett, author of Picking Bones From Ash, writes a moving meditation on Japan. Before: “If it’s spring, the bento stalls in the station sell cherry blossom-themed meals to eat on the train . . . cakes made of mochi rice paste are cut into flower shapes.” And now:

Bret Easton Ellis: “You’re completely missing the point if you think the Charlie Sheen moment is really a story about drugs.”

James Frey Coverage of Japan’s earthquake and aftershocks from the London Review of Books blog: A first-person account of the quake and its aftermath by R.T. Ashcroft, and a post from Hugh Pennington, who writes today that the nuclear risk from the stricken Fukushima I power plant is more like Three Mile Island than Chernobyl. James Frey, never shy about, well, anything really, plans to stoke the flames of controversy once again with a new novel about the second coming of Christ in the Bronx. Is all publicity good publicity? Only if you’re an unknown writer, says a new

Jennifer Egan, photo by Marion Ettlinger Last night, the NBCC announced its 2010 award winners, which included Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (fiction), C.D. Wright’s One with Others (poetry), and Clare Cavanagh’s Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics (criticism). We were thrilled to see that Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live won the award for biography; her meditation on French essayist Montaigne is not just intelligent and engaging but probably the best self-help book we’ve ever come across. The Rumpus Book Club has announced its May selections: Orientation and Other Stories by Daniel Orozco and Silver Sparrow by

NBCC Poetry Award Finalist Anne Carson Many people say contemporary poetry is an acquired taste—written for people in the know. But Oprah’s O magazine is trying to change that idea. In April, it will run its first poetry issue; a concept hatched during a sleepover with Maria Shriver, who will guest edit the issue. Other contributors include Matt Dillon on Yeats, Sting on Ted Hughes, and Bono in a feature called “Poetic Souls.” [Via the Book Bench] The National Book Critics Circle awards will be announced tonight at the New School. Here, the Washington Post rounds up the poetry

Georges Perec The new Newsweek and the redesigned New York Times Magazine: A side-by-side comparison. Nothing can approximate the “if/then” contortions of OULIPO author Georges Perec’s newly translated volume, The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise, but this interactive flow chart hints at the book’s hilarious and inventive office-drone odyssey. Dare you ask your boss for a raise today? You’d better check with Perec first. The 2011 Morning News Tournament of Books has begun. In the first round of competition, Teddy Wayne’s Kapitoil faced off against Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom—and lost. Judge Sarah Manguso tells you why. Today,

Joanna Yas Editor Thomas Beller details the history of the recently closed literary magazine Open City, which he co-edited with Joanna Yas: “It’s a magazine, it’s over, life will go on. But there was a lot of life in it. A lot of death, too. Thirty issues in twenty years. A lot of life pressed into those pages.” When are we going to see the much-anticipated New York Times’s paywall? The paper’s own Public Editor, Arthur Brisbane, wanted to know, but the best answer he could get was this exasperated response from the Times’s Media Editor: “We still don’t