Kevin Keller, from archiecomics.com Stephen Ambrose liked Ike plenty, but seems to have known him less well than previously thought. The popular historian’s apparently faked interviews with Dwight D. Eisenhower have scholars scrambling—how many have cited Ambrose’s allegedly fictional footnotes?  A brief on the short story’s sinister appeal from this weekend’s LA Times Book Festival. Ken Auletta chats with the Terry Gross about e-book’s viability as publishing’s (latest) savior. Meanwhile, David Quigg thinks Auletta “has stopped making sense”. Archie Comics introduces its first gay character, resulting in “hand-wringing and high-fiving, raised eyebrows and rolled eyes.”

Return of the rebel: A long-lost video of James Dean and Ronald Reagan has recently resurfaced, and “metaphysical practitioner” Patricia Leone has enlisted Dean—from beyond the grave—to write The Lost Memoirs.

Charles Willeford Luscious and lurid, a Charles Willeford paperback is a sure score whether found in a dusty attic or in an upscale Brooklyn flea market bin. Tonight, Thirty Days Gallery hosts a Willeford symposium. He was known for his crime novels, but wasn’t afraid to delve into seedier territory. His 1988 autobiography, I was Looking for a Street, was recently re-released as a Picturebox paperback edition, emblazoned with both a Jonthan Lethem blurb and an introduction from Luc Sante. Resale rates must be skyrocketing; do we hear the Library of America calling? Michael Foley, author of The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it

Bard of the postwar British working-class Alan Sillitoe has died at age eighty-two. Known for the novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), and the story collection The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1959), Sillitoe was pretty mad about being lumped in with the Angry Young Man brand of British literature. He’ll be widely eulogized with a quote from the film version of Saturday Night: “Whatever people say I am, that’s what I’m not.” But it is an earlier line in that scene that’s more expressive of Sillitoe’s art: “I’m not barmy, I’m a fighting pit-prop that wants a pint of beer, that’s me. But if any knowing bastard says that’s me,

Robert Service is not pleased with Orlando Figes’s Amazon-rating shenanigans, as Service writes; “it’s been quite a fortnight.” 

Jonathan Lethem has been tapped to fill David Foster Wallace’s old teaching gig at Pomona College, while editor Sean McDonald, best known for his work on James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, is heading to FSG to take Lorin Stein’s old job, as Stein helms the Paris Review. Let the buzz begin; Tom McCarthy’s forthcoming follow-up novel to his much praised volume Remainder, the one-letter titled C, has already caused a stir in the book world. That’s in part because of Peter Mendelsund’s striking dot-dot-dash book jacket. The Knopf designer chats with McCarthy and Casual Optimist blogger Dan Wagstaff. Five Chapters has run an excerpt from Julie Oringer’s forthcoming fiction, Invisible Bridge, every day

Joshua Ferris Tonight at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Joshua Ferris discusses his new novel The Unnamed with Daniel Menaker. Ferris, whose first novel, Then We Came to the End, won wide acclaim for its mix of office angst and first-person-plural laughs, takes a different tack with The Unnamed, a Beckett-esque fable about the perils of compulsive perambulation.  M. P. Shiel’s 1901 work A Purple Cloud is puffy with purple prose, but oddly prescient.    Naked Launch: A frozen moment when you realize that the newly syndicated Barnes and Noble reviews on Salon might be a bit undercooked. Stefan Beck sends Naked Lunch back to the kitchen with a dismissive sniff, provoking scuffles in the

“Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company,” Mark Twain quipped; we wonder who he’s hobnobbing with today, the centenary of his death. Twain, a high school dropout, draft-dodger, and rascal to the last, was not just any American, he was, as he liked to say, “the American.” From Collier’s Weekly, a 1910 verse account of his last day, and from the New York Times, an absorbing display of his library, where you can peruse his acerbic marginalia. Equally cutting is Gary Indiana’s take on recent books about Twain’s last decade. Twain biographer Ron Powers writes of how a chance encounter with a fourteen year-old girl named Laura Wright enchanted

This airborne toxic event is giving the London Book Fair the doldrums The “Airborne Toxic Event” has finally come to pass, just in time for Delillo fans to joke about it at the sparsely attended London Book Fair. Ask your barista for a triple grande Balzac: the author had a “horrible, rather brutal method” for overcoming writer’s block—a coffee creation so sinister that he recommended it “only to men of excessive vigor” (it eventually killed him). Elsewhere in Lapham’s Quarterly, a visual guide to the stronger stuff writers imbibed.  Cory Doctorow asks, “can you survive a benevolent dictatorship?” You’d think he was talking about

Writing life in New York City Was Proust “mentally defective”? (Evelyn Waugh thought so). Baudelaire called Voltaire “the king of nincompoops,” and Nabokov once wrote of Hemingway: “I read him for the first time in the early ‘forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.” Compared to this compilation of writer-on-writer cracks, the press drubbing that Yann Martel has lately been enduring seems tame. The long-vanquished Brits have a bit of fun at our first president’s expense: “Founder of a nation, trouncer of the English, God-fearing family man: all in all, George Washington has enjoyed a pretty decent reputation. Until now, that

This weekend, delve into UbuWeb’s recent addition to the William Burroughs sound archives, 1965’s “Call me Burroughs,” as well as the audio collection of his buddy Brion Gysin’s work. Just be sure you have some time on your hands; this stuff is about as addictive as the smack Burroughs preferred.

Don’t make me come back there: When the New York Times’s star columnists squabble, Clark Hoyt settles the score. Former FSG editor Lorin Stein takes the helm at the Paris Review’s Spring Revel, and chats about his new gig. The Guardian has given the story an oddly Onion-esque headline, but don’t let that stop you from reading about Eleanor Ross Taylor, and exploring her moving poetry. We’d love to curl up with Earth is a Blue Pearl, and the other classics created by author Douglas Coupland for his new project: to explain 2010 to someone in 1935, by inventing

Timothy McSweeney has been invited to the Salon.

Untitled (Rimbaud in New York), by David Wojnarowicz, from the Fales Library. Why is good erotic writing so hard to pull off? It’s icky, funny, or at best, boring. The Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award always gets a lot of play (see this year’s winner), but Canadian novelist Russel Smith thinks it’s “a mean-spirited exercise in playground mockery and repression.” And speaking of bad sex: Granta, we need to talk about this cover. @bard @bieber #tragedy: “Romeo and Juliet” is being tweeted; meanwhile, the Library of Congress has announced it’s preserving all public tweets forever. I like

Deborah Eisenberg The Atlantic’s fiction issue is out now, among the many must-reads is a conversation with Paul Theroux on “Fiction in the Age of E-books.” What Cheever was to commuter country, Deborah Eisenberg is to Manhattan malaise. Her underrated short stories are a veritable taxonomy of urban dysfunction. Tonight, she reads from her new volume, Collected Stories, at Chelsea’s 192 Books. Cult-celebrity spotters should scan the audience for her longtime partner, Wallace Shawn, who lately has been stealing scenes in contemporary drama’s most gripping panorama of unhappy uptowners, Gossip Girl. It is National Library Week, and the gray

Pulitizer Prize winner Paul Harding is trying very hard not to say “I told you so.” The giddy highs and woeful lows of a quarter-century of punk publishing, as seen by Jennifer Joseph of Manic D Press. How do you like your canon served, and how do you pick up the check? That’s the central question behind Open Letter publisher Chad Post’s peeved reaction to Newsweek writer Malcolm Jones’s critique of the Library of America. Jones asks if the LOA has “jumped the shark,” because they devote volumes to the likes of Philip K. Dick and (special Newsweek shudder

At The Rumpus, Steve Almond recaps this weekend’s AWP conference in “Things To Do in Denver When You’re Braindead,” and sensibly suggests that we worship George Saunders for his dignified bearing, flirt, and “lament.”

Olga Grushin In a world full of bias, bunk, and super-sized opinion, these anonymous scribes find the facts, and save face, for the world’s most trusted publications. Uh-Oprah: The notorious Kitty Kelley has penned an unauthorized biography of Winfrey, book publishing’s most sought after sales-booster, who might host a book club show on her new network. A report from this weekend’s AWP conference, on indie publishers’ electronic-book plans: Graywolf Press will have them this fall, Coffee House Press is also taking the plunge, while Melville House reports that its first Kindle title, Every Man Dies Alone, has been a

This weekend, book lovers should flock to downtown Brooklyn’s 177 Livingston, where Triple Canopy is hosting West Coast indie publisher Publication Studio. They’ll be making books by day (10-4, Saturday), and hosting a discussion and party tonight and Saturday night. Art, live music, industry speculation, and cheap drinks are secondary seductions to lure you to the real prize, the Studio’s extraordinary books.

Michael Hofmann “Are You Absolutely, Positively, and Wholeheartedly Ready to Publish Your Novel?” You can find out here. On April 30, the PEN World Voices Festival is hosting a panel discussion called “A New World of Yesterday: Stefan Zweig’s Utopian Nostalgia.” It will feature Zweig enthusiasts Klemens Renoldner, the director of the Stefan Zweig Centre at the University of Salzburg, and George Prochnik, who has written about Freud’s trip to America and the importance of silence (he is now writing a book about Zweig).  Here’s the kicker: the panel will also feature Michael Hofmann, whose resume includes translating Thomas