The New York Times reports that journalist Jim Frederick—the author of Black Hearts: One Platoon’s Descent Into Madness in Iraq’s Triangle of Death—has died. The Times obituary describes Black Hearts as documenting “the intense and withering experience of a group of men who were poorly commanded, overwhelmed with stress and witness to myriad bloody calamities, including the deaths of comrades.”

Politico reports that Amazon has hired a group of lobbyists and wooed members of Congress in an attempt to build its political influence: “Amazon’s aggressive tactics were on display in July, when the

"The permanent retainer behind Liza’s uninsured upper front teeth had endured some irremediable catastrophe, leaving her bowl of cereal unchomped for the first time in decades." So begins “Sentimental Driftwood,” a story by Yelena Akhtiorskaya, whose first book, Panic in a Suitcase, has just been released by Riverhead. The story begins: Carla Blumenkranz recently interviewed Akhtiorskaya for Bookforum.

At the LRB, the novelist Helen DeWitt describes being stalked at her family cottage in Vermont. When her stalker is finally, after many months, arrested, the sentence he receives is minimal. He

The New Inquiry’s August issue, on the unseasonable theme of “Mourning,” is out. From the editors’ note: “A good death is the deal life made with us, or vice versa: a world of intensities and sensations, for the price of its end. But the ubiquity of colonial and capitalist murder breaks the pact between life and death by rendering both bleakly arbitrary.”

Celebrating its 10th anniversary, Guernica “grows up,” according to The Rumpus. The online magazine has hired its first full-time publisher and has a print edition in the works.

Carrie Brownstein has agreed to write a screenplay based on

Tonight at 7pm, we’ll be at BookCourt to see a stellar group of authors—all faculty of Farleigh Dickinson’s MFA program—read their work: Jeffrey Renard Allen (Song of the Shank), Rene Steinke (Friendswood), David Grand (Mount Terminus), Thomas E. Kennedy (Beneath the Neon Egg), and H.L. Hix (As Much as, If Not More Than).

n+1 on paying writers: “For a young writer who hopes to produce literature, the greatest difference between now and twenty years ago may be that now she expects to get paid. Twenty years ago, art and commerce appeared to be opposing forces. The more you were paid for your

Bookforum is now available as an app! You may download our Summer issue for free at the iTunes store. Single issues and one-year subscriptions will be available for purchase with the launch of our next issue, out in early September.

In a recent episode of HBO’s “Last Week Tonight,” John Oliver had words for publishers using native advertising (i.e., ads that have the appearance of news stories), to bolster revenues. In Oliver’s view, native ads will erode public trust in the media. The comedian specifically targeted The Atlantic, for its much-maligned scientology ad in early 2013, and the New

Tired of complaints about Amazon, Chris Kubica recently spoke with people in the publishing industry about what they thought would make a Publisher’s Weekly has named the “most anticipated books of Fall 2014.”

Jason Diamond, who has covered books at Flavorwire, is moving to Men’s Journal.

Monica Lewinski is now a contributor to Vanity Fair, Beth Kseniak, a spokesperson for the magazine, has told Politico. “There is no set schedule or subject area, but she and her editor are on the lookout for relevant topics of interest,” says Kseniak.

The New Inquiry is closing in on its $25,000 goal in a fundraising campaign that ends today. If the (excellent) online magazine reaches its goal, an anonymous donor will kick in a matching $25,000 gift.

The writer Kate Bolick, who hosts a literary interview series at Edith Wharton's country estate, the Mount, has compiled a guide to entertaining that takes cues from Wharton's life and literature. Bolick's first tip ("Chapter 1: Police the Guest List") begins: "Only invite people you really like—otherwise there's no point."

McSweeney's is launching a short-story contest for undergraduate and

T.C. Boyle’s East is East includes a character called “La Dershowitz,” a young writer of high ambitions and meager talent who writes restaurant reviews. At the Paris Review blog, Michelle Huneven reveals that the character was clearly based on her: She knew Boyle, who called her “La Huneven”; she wrote restaurant reviews; she was an aspiring novelist. Huneven describes the pain of recognizing herself in the “talentless airhead poseur trying to break into the hallowed world of literature,” the ”sense of powerlessness and an utter lack of recourse.” And yet people who recognize themselves in

OkCupid’s popular blog, OkTrends, is back after a three-year hiatus. Written by Christian Rudder, a co-founder of the dating website, the blog returns with a post mocking Facebook’s recent data-collection scandal—not making fun of Facebook, as you might think, but rather what Rudder considers the naive outrage of its users: “Guess what, everybody: if you use the Internet, you’re the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site. That’s how websites work.” OkTrends, after all, is built on data gathered from OkCupid users. Rudder describes one experiment in which they gave

In the UK, nine million fewer books were given as gifts in 2013. In the United States, gifts counted for 22 percent of book sales, a drop from 24 percent the year prior. Digital e-books counted for a quarter of all book purchases.

Forty-four states plus Washington DC have poet laureates or writer in residence positions, many of these dating from the past twenty years. Certain cities, including Boston and Los Angeles, have created similar posts. The roles of the poet laureates vary. Some have taken an activist role: Joseph Brodsky tried to get poetry books in every hotel room in the country;

On Friday, Buzzfeed fired its editor and writer Benny Johnson for plagiarism, after learning from Twitter users that Johnson had been lifting passages from other stories, sometimes word for word, without attribution in his own work. Upon reviewing Johnson’s work, Buzzfeed found 41 cases of plagiarism in 500 of Johnson’s posts. Buzzfeed editor Ben Smith has issued an apology to the site’s readers.

Roxane Gay, author of the recent novel An Untamed State and the new essay collection Bad Feminist, is stepping down as the essay editor at The Rumpus. She has been replaced by Mary-Kim Arnold.

Dazed

An interactive graph allows you to track the usage of particular words in New York Times articles over time. “Famously,” for example, appeared in five articles in 1966 and 1332 articles in 2012.

Gawker lists the ten “worst New Yorker ‘longreads’”: among them, Adam Gopnik on baking bread; Tad Friend on apartment-hunting; Anthony Lane on Scarlett Johansson; Susan Orlean on walking; John Updike on losing his hat; Malcolm Gladwell on basketball; David Remnick, the boss of the magazine, on the Boss; and Janet Malcolm on Eileen Fisher. Seems a little unfair to put Malcolm on the list, but the Fisher