The University of South Carolina has acquired Elmore Leonard's papers, one hundred and fifty boxes of them, plus a stash of his Hawaiian shirts.

Robots are writing fiction. A sample written by the Georgia Institute of Technology's "Scheherezade": “John took another deep breath as he wondered if this was really a good idea, and entered the bank. John stepped into line behind the last person and waited his turn. When the person before John had finished, John slowly walked up to Sally. The teller said, "Hello, my name is Sally, how can I help you?" Sally got scared when John approached because

This year’s Alice Award—an annual $25,000 prize for illustrated art books—goes to the Whitney Museum of American Art for Hopper Drawing, which was published in conjunction with last year’s Edward Hopper exhibit.

Former child star Mara Wilson, who starred in ’90s hits Mrs. Doubtfire and Matilda, has made a deal with Penguin Books for a book of personal essays about “being young, female, and a little out of place.”

Who is Elena Ferrante, anyway?

Sarah Brouillette at Jacobin argues that it’s impossible for the Nobel Prize to separate literature from politics.

Here’s a guide to the 2014 National

The Australian writer Richard Flanagan collected the Man Booker Prize yesterday for his book The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

The forty-eight-year-old San Francisco Bay Guardian has abruptly stopped publication; its owner, the San Francisco Media Company, is pulling funding. Today’s issue will be the last.

At Buzzfeed, Dao Nguyen has been named publisher, which means, CEO Jonah Peretti says, overseeing “tech, product, data and everything related to our publishing platform.” Nguyen has been in charge of “growth” at the website for some time, and has done very well: Buzzfeed claims to be

Cornel West was among those arrested yesterday at a protest outside the police department in Ferguson, Missouri.

The Washington Post has announced that Carlos Lozada, currently an editor at the paper’s Outlook section, will become its new nonfiction-book critic. “This summer, Carlos developed a detailed proposal on how to reimagine the role of the nonfiction book critic for a digital age—and proceeded to pitch himself for the role,” the Post says in an announcement of the hire. “He had a great idea, and we agreed that he’d be perfect for it.”

The Man Booker Prize was opened this year to

According to Publisher’s Weekly, professional attendance was down at the Frankfurt Book Fair, but general enthusiasm was up, and “business was brisk.” HarperCollins CEO Brian Murray, who spoke at the fair's opening ceremony, proclaimed it a time for digital experimentation. Frankfurt Book Fair director Juergen Boos suggested that the fair itself is planning many changes, announcing that in 2015, English-language publishers will move to a more central location. “We know that digital is going to stay, print is going to stay, Amazon is going to stay," Boos said. "But it is not the end of the world.

The New York Observer profiles the social-media network Ello, known as Facebook’s new competitor. Ello insists that it is not trying to take over Facebook, but rather offer "a small alternative." “Success to us just means that Ello works and that people use it," says Paul Budnitz, a co-founder of the website. "There’s no way we’re not going to survive.” Right now, people are joining at a rate of 40,000 per hour. 

A member of the Nobel Prize committee, Horace Engdahl, has suggested that writers’ increasing “professionalization” has been detrimental to their art. “Previously, writers would work

The French writer Patrick Modiano has been awarded the Nobel Prize. Modiano was born in 1945, to a Belgian actress mother and an Italian-Jewish father. His first novel, La Place de L’Etoile, about a Jewish collaborator in World War II, was published in 1968. (His father reportedly so disapproved that he tried to buy up all the copies.) Modiano has published more than twenty-five books since, among them Missing Person, Out of the Dark, and Dora Bruder. "I prefer not to read my early books," he said in 2010. "Not that I don't like them, but I don't recognize myself anymore, like an old actor

Emma Cline's debut novel, The Girls, provoked a bidding war among twelve publishers and sold to Random House, as part of a three-book deal, for somewhere in the ballpark of seven figures.

Now that the New York Times Magazine’s “One-Page Magazine” has been disposed of, editors Samantha Henig and Jon Kelly offer an oral history of the page’s “Meh List.”

A Swedish Nobel prize judge thinks that the “professionalization” of writers—via grants and creative writing courses—is putting the future of Western literature in jeopardy.

Sinead O’Connor is writing a memoir, and promises it will be juicy:

The new issue of Dissent is out, with pieces on politics and the novel from Helen DeWitt, Nikil Saval, Roxanne Gay, and Vivian Gornick. In his introduction to the issue, David Marcus writes that political novels "can help keep our eyes on the present," offering "neither visions of what our lives ought to be like in the future nor paeans to how our lives once were lived."

The BTK serial killer explained in a letter from prison that he will cooperate with the writer Katherine Ramsland, a forensic psychology professor at DeSales University in Pennsylvania, on her book about his crimes.

The New

EMILY’s List—an organization that advocates for female Democratic politicians who support abortion rights—has partnered with Lena Dunham, who will promote the group during her author tour for Not that Kind of Girl.

At Politico, Hadas Gold suggests that the Daily Beast is thriving thanks to Tina Brown’s departure, citing a 60 percent increase in traffic over the past year.

Dodai Stewart is leaving her position as managing editor of Gawker’s Jezebel site to join Fusion.net, where she’ll join Jezebel founder Anna Holmes, who left the Wall Street Journal to join the Fusion staff in July.

Late

At Buzzfeed, Emily Gould says that the usual advice of Nell Zink issues a dispatch from August’s Worldcon—the World Science Fiction Convention, held this year in London—where she attended, among other events, a panel on “Being a Fan of Problematic Things.” Zink's debut novel, The Wallcreeper, came out this week.

The Economist and the Financial Times have recently begun selling ads at prices based not on number of page-views but on the how much time readers spend on a page. FT’s commercial director of digital advertising explains: “Logic would say: Let’s start to value the amount of time spent

The American Scholar has started a list of bad opening lines of novels—Richard Powers’s opening of Galatea 2.2, to take one example: “It was like so, but wasn’t.”

Two new funders of Reddit, according to a list the website recently released: Jared Leto and Snoop Dogg.

People are betting on who will win the Nobel Prize for literature, which should be announced next week. Ladbrokes has predicted the winner four times in nine years (not super confidence-inducing); this year, they have five-to-one odds on Haruki Murakami and twelve-to-one odds on Joyce Carol Oates. Don Delillo and Richard Ford