Victor Lavalle Here’s a fascinating document that reveals the editorial changes made to David Foster Wallace’s posthumously published story, “Backbone” (a fragment from his forthcoming novel The Pale King), before appearing in the New Yorker last week. [Via the Millions] Jon Cotner, one of the authors behind the excellent book, Ten Walks/Two Talks, has been covering the Armory Show for the Paris Review. In the process, he managed to ask Mayor Bloomberg what he thinks of Picasso’s blue period. Letterpress, the printing technique beloved by chapbook and limited edition art book publishers, comes to the iPad. As Andrew Gorin

“Tweets were sent. Dictators were toppled. Internet = democracy. QED. Sadly, this is the level of nuance in most popular accounts of the Internet’s contribution to the recent unrest in the Middle East.” Evgeny Morozov reconsiders the claim that Facebook and Twitter were driving forces behind the Middle East uprisings.

Biographer and critic Hazel Rowley has passed away at the age of 59. She wrote biographies of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (Tete a Tete), Richard Wright, and Christina Stead, as well as the 2010 first-couple study Franklin and Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage. Rowley was an accomplished essayist and frequent contributor to Bookforum, in which she wrote about Wright and the 1950s culture wars, Beavoir’s 1960 trip to Brazil, and Paris’s legendary Village Voice bookstore.

Hazel Rowley, photo by Mathieu Bourgois. Theodore Ross has a funny—and wise—article called “Drinking off the Job,” detailing how his life has changed after his recent departure from Harper’s magazine: “The past few weeks the better part of my social life has revolved around drinks. I can’t speak to the cultural mores of other industries, but publishing tends to liberally grease the runners of those it transports out the door.” This April, OR Books is publishing Tweets from Tahrir, a collection of pivotal mini-dispatches from the epicenter of the Cairo uprising—telling the story of the Egyptian Revolution as it

Terry Castle Apple guru Steve Jobs made a surprise appearance to unveil the new iPad (he is currently on sick leave). Apple has also announced that Random House will begin offering titles through the iBookstore, which has sold one hundred million books since its launch. Open City, the literary magazine run by Tom Beller, Joanna Yas, and others, is closing. The journal, which introduced us to voices such as Sam Lipsyte, and published vital work by many excellent authors for two decades, will be much missed. Luckily, the Open City Books imprint will continue. Literary critic Terry Castle’s smart,

Frank Rich The new issue of The Believer includes the 2010 editors’ shortlist for their annual Book Award (GalleyCat has assembled a collection of links to the finalists), as well as a new Poetry Award. In Tunisia and Egypt, books banned by the recently ousted regimes are back on the shelves. New York magazine’s Adam Moss has lured New York Times stalwart Frank Rich away from the paper after a long career. Rich says of the appointment by his old buddy Moss: “The role Adam has created for me at his revitalized New York Magazine will allow me to

Steve Erickson Here’s a cheerful thought by Rudolph Delson, from the forthcoming anthology The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books (edited by the folks at The Millions and including an all-star lineup of contributors): “Most of the best books will be written only after you and I are both dead.” Via the Paris Review, an intriguing exchange between PR poetry editor Robyn Creswell and a blogger known only as the “Angry Arab,” about Egyptian literature. Last week, Elif Batuman gave a lecture at the British Museaum about literature and accounting, as the Granta blog explains: “She

Lorin Stein, photo by Deidre Schoo for The New York Times Famed blogger Andrew Sullivan is leaving The Atlantic to move to the Daily Beast/Newsweek. Paris Review editor Lorin Stein gets the luxe treatment in the Times weekend Fashion and Style page, which lovingly details the retro Rolodex and “neat bowel of paper clips” on his desk, follows Stein through a busy night of socializing, and deems him “an unlikely sex symbol” (helpfully noting that “among New York’s literary crowd, being pale, thin and occasionally bespectacled doesn’t count against you”). Style points aside, the Review has never been better:

Letter from an Unknown Woman “Poverty is poverty and it sucks and it sucks so much more when you have a child. There is no romance in getting up at 5 am to write your poems and coming home at night when the young boys are just going out to their bars.” Sandra Simmons writes about the challenges of being a “poor poetry mother.” In April, Sarabande Books plans to publish a new chapbook by Lydia Davis titled The Cows, which reprints a story that first appeared in the journal Electric Literature. This news reminded us of Donna K’s

Christian Hawkey Robert Silvers of The New York Review of Books, David Remnick of The New Yorker, and other editors respond to the recent discussions about the “dearth of female bylines.” Apple is planning to unveil the iPad 2 on March 2, leaving less than a week for breathless speculation about what the new features will be. We’re pretty sure that whatever they come up with will be dubbed “revolutionary.” In anticipation of David Foster Wallace’s forthcoming The Pale King, you can listen to the BBC’s recent radio doc about the novelist (via Flavorwire), which feature interviews with Don

Kenneth Slawenski Kenneth Slawenski, the author of an acclaimed new J. D. Salinger biography (and the great website Dead Caulfields), is a bit like his hero: There’s no author photo on the book, a minimal “about the author” note, and he’s granted only a few interviews. But Salinger fans, rest assured, Slawenski is no phony: “I know it’s inevitable that they are going to draw a correlation between me and Salinger, but this isn’t a stunt . . . This is just the way I am.” From The Guardian: A list of the top ten fictional poets, (and their

Jonathan Safran Foer Thanks to McNally Jackson Books’ always enlightening Twitter feed, we’ve discovered the New Yorker’s primary documents digital archive, which contains fascinating reading material from recent articles, including a trove of “Documents From Legal Cases Involving Scientology,” an excerpt from Teju Cole’s novel Open City, and a heavily annotated draft of John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address. Note: We’re going to miss marginalia. Do you know your Joshua Ferris from your Jonathan Safran Foer? Show your stuff with The Guardian’s Brooklyn books quiz. We’re looking forward to the 2012 Olympics in London—and not just for the chance to

Wells Tower Wells Tower’s 2009 story collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, was met with nearly universal critical praise, the capstone being Edmund White’s glowing front page review in the Times book review, an enviable accomplishment for an author who had already made a name for himself as an ace magazine reporter (he has since been deemed one of the New Yorker’s twenty best writers under 40). Now, in the Brooklyn Rail, Paul Maliszewski has written a much-discussed, mostly negative review of Tower’s work, noting a curious inertness in his fiction, and finding that it is too much like his

Geoff Dyer, photo by Jason Oddy. Wonkette has a hilarious takedown of “literary detective” Jack Cashill’s horrific-sounding book Deconstructing Obama: The Life, Loves, and Letters of America’s First Postmodern President. Published this week, the volume argues—among other things—that Bill Ayers wrote Obama’s book Dreams from My Father, and derides the president for claiming to be influenced by Langston Hughes and Richard Wright (because they were communists!). The Times blames “strategic missteps, executive turnover and a failure to understand the digital revolution” for Borders’ bankruptcy, in an article detailing the chain’s forty year rise and fall, from its humble beginning

At The Rumpus, Jessica Probus imagines what it would be like to have sex with a list of books, beginning with Kafka’s Metamorphosis. And in the comments section, readers name the book that, were it human, they’d like to pick up in a bar. Are e-books more permanent than print? Now that Borders is filing bankruptcy, Kobo has had to reassure its customers on the company’s FAQ page: “The Borders e-book experience is powered by Kobo, an entirely separate company from Borders. Kobo is financially secure and will continue to maintain your e-book library no matter what happens.” At

Andrew O’Hagan Meet the alleged ghostwriter of Julian Assange’s forthcoming memoir: Novelist and critic Andrew O’Hagan, whose significant list of accomplishments include conducing a public interview with Norman Mailer and writing a novel from the point of view of Marylin Monroe’s dog. The story behind how twenty four year old Alexandra Kleeman had her debut short story, “Fairy Tale,” published in the Paris Review. James Wolcott reports that he’s received an alarming email from Martin Amis, asking Wolcott to provide him and his wife a place to crash, because he’s “being persecuted in his native land and their new

Thomas Bernhard Borders is going bankrupt. Why do English-language readers of Thomas Bernhard like him in a way that German-language readears don’t? Gideon Lewis-Kraus explains at n+1: “I suspect the chief reason we’ve taken to Bernhard in a way that surprises German-speakers is that we have long been accustomed to the great pleasures of what the English writer Geoff Dyer has called ‘the literature of neurasthenia, of anxiety, fretting, complaint.’” Senior editor Donovan Hohn has left Harper’s magazine to become a features editor at GQ. Tonight at the Barnes and Noble in Manhattan’s Union Square, Physicist Brian Greene will

Wait, we almost forgot: It’s Valentine’s Day! Over at The Independent, John Walsh wonders if we’ve “lost the art of writing love letters”? And at FiveChapters.com, Lynne Tillman offers part one of her story “Love Sentences,” which (so far) examines the evolution of love letters, and introduces us to a character who seems especially attuned to the gap between feeling and text: “I want ecstasy, not evidence.”

Ahmed Fouad Negm, photo by Dana Smillie/Polaris, for the New York Times The Paris Review’s poetry editor Robyn Creswell has a fascinating essay in yesterday’s Times about the role of authors in Egyptian society and in the January 25th revolution. Creswell notes that “for the crowds in Tahrir, now is above all a time for poetry, and the muse of the moment may be Ahmed Fouad Negm,” the dissident poet who has spent many years in jail, and wrote this oft-chanted poem: “They are the rich, and the government is on their side. / We are the poor, the

Thomas Sayers Ellis George Jones, Palace Brothers, Silver Jews, and Neil Young: Author Justin Taylor offers a “secret soundtrack” to his new novel, The Gospel of Anarchy. At The Paris Review, Blair Fuller recounts a night in 1952 when he had drinks with J.D. Salinger, who discussed Buddhism, dissed Harvard, and pledged his love to a young woman he had just met. Poet Thomas Sayers Ellis has stolen a life-sized cardboard cutout of Langston Hughes from a Washington, DC, restaurant and poetry venue called Busboys and Poets, in protest of the low rates poets receive for reading there. The