The Peter Mendelson has posted the jacket design for Tom McCarthy's novel Satin Island, which will be published by Knopf in February 2015.

At the Baffler, Jacob Silverman reflects on YouTube’s recent threat to block the videos of independent labels if the labels don’t agree to YouTube-set terms. The company’s “rough tactics clash with its self-generated populist aura,” Silverman observes.

An interview with Barbara Cassin, the author of the Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, which appeared originally in French and has been reworked and rereleased in multiple languages.

The cartoonist Charles Barsotti died yesterday, at the age of eighty. Barsotti drew nearly 1400 cartoons for the New Yorker over the course of fifty years.

Gawker Media graduated the first class of its “Recruits” program, which trains new writers and pays them a $1500 monthly stipend, plus extra money based on how many clicks they can generate ($5 for every 1000 “uniques,” or unique visitors). Eight of the first eighteen recruits will be hired on full-time.

“The written word has been dying for so long!!” Rivka Galchen exclaims at the New York Times. “You’ve read this argument before. Then we

Carla Blumenkranz, a writer and editor at n+1, has just been hired to be a senior editor at the New Yorker’s website.

Disappointed by the exclusion of women from most discussions of the mystical Great American Novel, Elaine Showalter chooses six women writers from the United States who should be part of the conversation.

According to Nielsen, the self-publishing market is growing rapidly in the UK, where approximately 81 million self-published titles were sold last year.

Ben Marcus—the author of Notable American Women and The Flame Alphabet, among other innovative works of fiction—learns to

What obstacles are in the way of reading anything of any length today, and how has the novel responded to these competitors for readers’ attention? At the New York Review of Books, Tim Parks considers the effects of the problem “we all know”—that “every moment of serious reading has to be fought for, planned for” because “the mind . . . is overwhelmingly inclined toward communication or, if that is too grand a word, to the back and forth of contact with others.” Not only are we constantly interrupted, we want to be interrupted. Contemporary novels have accordingly adopted a “battering ram

At the New Republic, Christopher Ketcham has written a long article about the accusation that Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges is a plagiarist.

The lineup for the 2014 Brooklyn Book Festival have been announced with usual borough suspects such as Paul Auster and Colson Whitehead being joined by more than 100 other writers, including Edmund White, A. M. Homes, Philippe Petit, and Rebecca Mead. The festival’s main events will be held on September 21st, with other readings, talks, and panels running from the 15th through the 22nd.

Harvard University has announced that Jill Abramson

On the eve of the world cup, eleven writers—including Karl Ove Knausgaard, Geoff Dyer, Joseph O’Neill—pick the most compelling characters of the tournament. O’Neill chooses Netherlands star Arjen Robben: “Aged 30, he is a ringer for Patrick Stewart, who is 73. Like Stewart, Robben is chronically histrionic, only his is a limited villainous repertoire of dives, false grimaces, and mock seizures. Even his brilliance gets under the skin.”

A limited-edition book featuring the five “Talk of the Town” pieces Lillian Ross wrote about Francois Truffaut between the years 1960 and 1976 is being published

Yesterday, a federal appeals court granted universities, in conjunction with Google, the right to continue scanning millions of library books without the authors’ permission. The case, which was brought by the Authors’ Guild and other writers groups, argued that the scanning project breaks copyright law, but the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals decided that the scanning project falls within the accepted practices of the “fair use” doctrine.

George Will's latest Washington Post Op-Ed presents sexual assault at colleges as a sham perpetuated in large part by President Obama, and argues that

Darren Aronofsky is adapting Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy for HBO.

The bracket, books, and judges for Three Percent’s World Cup of Literature have been announced. Representing the US is David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, because the book, as the tournament’s organizers explain, is a lot like the national team: “An unfinished product, made of various pieces, and all about boredom (which is how some people in the States view soccer as a whole).”

The New Yorker has launched a new blog by Joshua Rothman on art and science.

Karl Ove Knausgaard arrived in New York last week to tour in

At the New Republic, Isaac Chotiner uses Michiko Kakutani’s write-up of Hillary Clinton’s new memoir as a “good lesson in how not to write a review.”

Robert Silvers recalls how The New York Review of Books became the subject of Martin Scorsese’s latest documentary.

“The price of a year at college has increased by more than 1,200 percent over the last 30 years, far outpacing any other price the government tracks: food, housing, cars, gasoline, TVs, you name it.” At Salon, Thomas Frank charts the alarming surge in college tuition, which is leaving generations in debt, and which no one seems to

Joshua Rothman introduces a new “blog about ideas” at the New Yorker.

Never mind books, it’s time for the World Cup! Some vaguely literary world cup coverage ahead of the tournament next week: John Cassidy at the New Yorker, and Simon Critchley at Roads & Kingdoms.

Capital New York reports that the law firm Outten & Golden, which has sued Condé Nast, Hearst, and other media companies for using unpaid interns, may be filing a class action lawsuit against Vice. A few former interns received letters from the firm notifying them of the investigation. Vice began paying interns $10 per hour last

Jonathan Shainin, an editor of the New Yorker website, is moving to London to edit a new section in the Guardian’s print and online editions.

The McSweeney’s archive, which the Ransom Center in Texas acquired last year, is now open for research.

Prizes, prizes everywhere: The New York Press Club awards have been announced, with Stephen Brill winning the Gold Keyboard, the most prestigious honor. In England, the Baileys Women’s Prize for fiction recognizes Eimear McBride for her first novel, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing; and in Spain, John Banville takes home the Prince of Asturias award for

The New Yorker’s love-themed summer fiction issue includes stories by Rachel Kushner, David Gilbert, Karen Russell, and Ramona Ausubel. The lineup looks good, but the video “preview” is twee and pointless.

James Joyce’s eyesight worsened because he had syphilis, a scholar claims. The smoking gun is apparently a medication he was prescribed, galyl, a combination of arsenic and phosphorus that was exclusively used to treat the disease.

Rebecca Solnit celebrates the #yesallwomen hashtag, and connects it to a handful of recently coined terms describing elements of women’s experience. The new