Spalding Gray David Rosenthal, who left his post at Simon Schuster last summer, has been hired by Penguin USA to lead a new imprint. According to an article at the Times, the position will generate “competition between Penguin and Simon Schuster,” as Rosenthal pursues authors he has worked with in the past, who have included Bob Dylan and Bob Woodward. The editor himself sounds prepared to mix things up. “I’m going to make lots of trouble,” he said. “They’re going to let me go after the kind of—I wouldn’t say quirky—but the peculiar stuff that I sometimes like. What

Iggy Pop and Michel Houellebecq, from the Paris Review. Polarizing French author Michel Houellebecq has won the Prix Goncourt for his fifth novel, La carte et le territoire, though the book was denounced earlier this year by Goncourt Academy member Tahar Ben Jelloun. In an interview in the most recent Paris Review, Houellebecq says of his critics: “They hate me more than I hate them. What I do reproach them for isn’t bad reviews. It is that they talk about things having nothing to do with my books . . . they caricature me so that I’ve become a

Nicole Krauss, photo by Joyce Ravid. WWD details the rivalry between Hugo Lindgren, the new editor of the New York Times Magazine, and his former boss, New York magazine’s Adam Moss. Lindgren asks: “Did you see this week’s issue [of New York]? They had one of our writers in there. They had pretty much our subject matter across the magazine. It’s totally good, though. What makes it good? Why are the Mets and Yankees spending so much money to put the best team out on the field? Because they don’t want to be the second best team in New

Rebecca Skloot, author of Amazon’s Best Book of 2010. Slate has published Mick Jagger’s rambling reaction to Keith Richards’s new memoir, Life. Jagger apparently accidentally sent the typewritten, stream-of-consciousness screed to journalist Bill Wyman instead of the Stones’ bassist of the same name who oversees the band’s archives. Is it a prank, a parody, or the legitimate scoop of the current blog cycle? Slate isn’t saying. Whatever the case, it makes for entertaining reading, as Jagger writes: “It is said of me that I act above the rest of the band and prefer the company of society swells. Would

Adam Levin We’re four days into National Novel Writing Month, the annual project that encourages procrastinating would-be authors to plow ahead and pen a 50,000 word novel from scratch in thirty days (quantity over quality is the rule), and fifty-thousand words have already been spilled about the merits of participating. At Salon, Laura Miller criticizes the endeavor, writing “the last thing the world needs is more bad books,” but Jacket Copy’s Carolyn Kellogg disagrees, as does Ron Hogan at Beatrice, and some folks who participate in NaNoWrMo, lodging their anti-Miller complaints on their blogs and Twitter. But wait, shouldn’t

Stacy Schiff, photo by Sheva Fruitman Why did indie publisher Soft Skull Press close its New York offices after seventeen years in the city? The Observer investigates. As the debate about Amazon’s sponsorship of the Best Translated Book Awards continues, the online bookselling giant has announced the first release of its new translation imprint, AmazonCrossing: Guinean author Tierno Monénembo’s The King of Kahel, a novel based on the life of Olivier de Sanderval, an early colonizer of West Africa. New York magazine has taken the iPad plunge with its new app, which integrates print content with live feeds from

Dave Eggers’s World Series sketch for San Francisco’s Bay Citizen. George W. Bush will be the headliner at this year’s Miami Book Fair. On November 14, he’ll give a straight-shooting talk about his memoir, Decision Points, which comes out a week from today. In the Drudge Report’s exclusive preview, we learn that Bush’s book begins with a trope found in so much of great literature, namely, a drinking binge: “Can you remember the last time you didn’t have a drink?” MobyLives airs some behind-the-scenes grumbling from the National Book Critics Circle Award, posting this remark from a dispirited anonymous

Joy Division, from Kevin Cummins’s new book of the band, published by Rizzoli. Last week, Melville House publisher Dennis Johnson announced that he was withdrawing his imprint’s books from the Best Translated Book awards because the “predatory and thuggish” Amazon.com is sponsoring the contest. Open Letter publisher Chad Post, who secured the Amazon funding for the prize, has responded to Johnson, writing that the judges may go ahead and award a Melville House book anyway, and wonders if Johnson is “also withdrawing support from PEN America, the 92nd St. Y, and all of these other organizations that have received

Zadie Smith Melville House publisher Dennis Johnson is withdrawing his imprint’s books from the Best Translated Book Award (which Melville House won last year), because Amazon is now sponsoring the prize. Johnson cites the web giants’s “predatory and thuggish practices,” and writes, “Taking money from Amazon is akin to the medical researchers who take money from cigarette companies.” Cultural critics fond of the long form, take note: Condensed reviews are gaining momentum. At the Huffington Post, Kimberly Brooks has introduced “Haiku Reviews,” which is, we have to say, false advertising, since the reviews so far aren’t true haikus, just

David Foster Wallace and friend The Millions links to a previously unpublished story by David Foster Wallace, which a few years ago was circulated samizdat-style and is now on Tumblr. The story, presumably from the author’s forthcoming posthumous novel, The Pale King, opens with a boy who wants “to press his lips to every square inch of his body,” hinting at a tragic mix of self-love and overwhelming isolation in ways that only DFW can. Daniel Ellsberg, the man famous for leaking the Pentagon Papers in 1971 (and the subject of a recent PBS documentary, “The Most Dangerous Man

Andy Hunter In an article about his literary magazine, Electric Literature, Brooklyn-based editor Andy Hunter offers an insightful meditation on how to succeed in contemporary publishing: “People often refer to Electric Literature as an ‘online magazine.’ In reality, online is the only place we do not publish.” The innovative publisher just released its latest app, produced with author Stephen Elliott for his excellent memoir The Adderall Diaries (film rights for Elliott’s book were recently optioned by James Franco). Elliott’s Rumpus Book Club unveils its latest selections, which include Rumpus Women Volume 1 (personal essays), Harlem Is Nowhere by Sharifa

Keith Richards Keith Richards’s memoir Life, for which he was paid a $7 million advance, is out, and the reviews are good. Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani—clearly a Stones fan—calls the book “electrifying.” She continues: “Mr. Richards’s prose is like his guitar playing: intense, elemental, utterly distinctive and achingly, emotionally direct.” At the Huffington Post, Jesse Kornbluth says Richards “serves [up his storires] like his guitar riffs—in your face, nasty, confrontational, rich, smart, and, in the end, unforgettable.” (The stories include how he did drugs not to nod out, but so he could work.) Audiobook fans are in for an

Kwame Anthony Appiah Richard Nash’s new publishing venture, Cursor, will be launched this spring with Lynne Tillman’s story collection Someday This Will Be Funny. Nash has big plans to adapt to the rapidly changing publishing industry, and they go beyond e-books: “I don’t know whether this is grandiose or insane or whatever, but I am trying to change about 18 different things at once.” Amazon has announced that the Kindle will soon allow you to lend e-books. The Virginia Quarterly Review is blogging again after a three-month hiatus following managing editor Kevin Morrissey’s suicide and a subsequent investigation into

Ben Greenman At the New Republic, Ruth Franklin weighs in on the weak Kathryn Harrison review of Lydia Davis’s new translation of Madame Bovary. Unlike Harrison, Franklin actually addresses the quality of the translation, and in some ways finds Davis’s approach lacking: “Faithful to a fault, even to the extent of preserving awkwardnesses and infelicities that other translators have silently smoothed out.” Rick Moody has kicked off his series of tweets about the future of publishing. Mediabistro’s GalleyCat recently joined other book review editors on a a panel to offer recommendations for how to pitch books for review. One

Tea Obreht The owners of Editor and Publisher, once dubbed the “bible of the newspaper industry,” have laid off the three staff members who survived the journal’s sale earlier this year. The University of Virginia has released its investigation of the Virginia Quarterly Review in the wake managing editor Kevin Morrissey’s suicide this summer, and while editor Ted Genoways has been cleared of bullying charges, the report does recommend that “appropriate corrective action” be taken for Genoways’s brusque managment style and his “failure . . . to follow institutional procedures in a variety of areas.” As the report dryly

James Franco James Franco just published his debut collection of short stories, Palo Alto. Is it any good? The critical deck is surely stacked against him, as Michael Lindgren writes in the Washington Post: “There is no rule that says handsome young movie stars cannot also be gifted writers, but Franco’s celebrity hangs like an unspoken rebuke over every word of Palo Alto. . . even if his prose somehow turned out to be staggeringly brilliant, the critics and bloggers and readers who make up the literary establishment would rather die than admit it.” Colson Whitehead reads from his

Harry Mathews This year’s Nobel Prize in Literature-winner Mario Vargas Llosa’s new novel, The Dream of the Celt, will be published in English in 2011. Literary legend Harry Mathews is appearing tonight at Manhattan’s 192 Books. Mathews founded the short-lived literary journal Locus Solus in the sixties with the New York School poets John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler, and in 1972 became the first American member of the influential French writing group the OULIPO (workshop for potential literature); he co-edited the OULIPO’s definitive English language collection. This evening, Mathews will be reading from his forthcoming book of

Raymond Carver If some sociologists regard intellectuals (you know, writers, ticket-takers at the roller-derby, etc.) as a sui generis group that transcends the otherwise surly bonds of class, Gerry Howard would disagree. In his essay in the current issue of Tin House, he reminds us how working-class scribes—Raymond Carver, Ken Kesey, Dorothy Allison—mined their blue-collar backgrounds to piercing, instructive effect, even as sophisticated critics, say, in Carver’s case, celebrated his fiction for begin deliciously “squalid.” Howard expands his case to address the current literary scene: “Working-class people who pay the punishing financial price that going to college extracts these

Natasha Wimmer According to the MobyLives blog, NPR has one rule about authors, which is known as the “dibs system”: “No one can appear on more than one NPR show. Ever.” Unless, that is, you’re Michele Norris, author of The Grace of Silence, a new memoir about her family’s racial history (and myths). Since that book appeared in stores, Morris has appeared on four different NPR shows, which might or might not have something to do with the fact that she is a co-host of NPR’s All Things Considered. The coverage has been controversial enough that Alicia Shepard, NPR’s

Xiaoda Xiao Bookforum and London Review of Books contributor Alex Abramovich edited the Very Short List back when it was owned by InterActiveCorp (and did an excellent job), but was let go when Barry Diller sold the site to the New York Observer in June 2009. Now, more than a year later, it seems that the VSL just can’t quit Abramovich: the NYO has just hired the writer to edit the website once again. The rumors that Stieg “Dragon Tatoo” Larsson wrote a fourth novel are apparently true. His family has “confirmed the existence of another manuscript.” The National