First Look Media, the online journalism company funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, has hired Matt Taibbi to head a new magazine about politics and finance. Earlier this month, First Look founded its first digital publication, The Intercept, which will produce stories based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden.

The Wikipedia Books Project is raising money in hopes of printing the online encyclopedia in book form, a project that will reach 1,000 volumes of roughly 1,200 pages each.

Over the weekend, Anne Rice, the bestselling author of vampire novels and books about Jesus Christ, used

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the author of Americanah, has penned an essay speaking out against the anti-gay law in Nigeria, calling for its repeal: “We cannot legislate into existence a world that does not exist: the truth of our human condition is that we are a diverse, multi-faceted species. The measure of our humanity lies, in part, in how we think of those different from us.”

Rick Perlstein has just announced a new book to be published this summer, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, the third volume in his history of American Conservatism.

Juan Tomás Avila

Canadian short story writer Mavis Gallant, who spent much of her adult life in Paris, died on Tuesday morning at the age of 91. Gallant was best-known in the US for stories published in the New Yorker (she wrote more than one hundred tales for them over the years). In 2013, the magazine’s fiction podcast featured Margaret Atwood reading and discussing Gallant’s story “Voices Lost in Snow,” and in 2007, Antonya Nelson read “When We Were Nearly Young.” Gallant’s work was collected in one volume in 1996, and the New York Review of Books have published several collections in recent years. Fellow

Facebook has tweaked its algorithm it uses to determine what appears in its news feeds, and it’s geared to encourage readers to share more “high-quality news content.”

The George Polk Awards in Journalism were announced on Sunday, with Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill, Laura Poitras, and Barton Gellman winning for their NSA stories, which used documents leaked by Edward Snowden. Other winners included Andrea Elliott, for her heartbreaking five-part portrait of a homeless child in New York, and Pete Hamill, who won a career-achievement prize.

At the New York Review of Books, Geoffrey O’Brien

Could the CIA be the most literary government agency? Consider its possible ties to the Paris Review, and to the Iowa Writers Workshop.

Robert W. Chambers's 1895 story collection The King in Yellow features a play that is so full of terrible truths that it drives viewers insane. The book has been an influence on many writers: H.P. Lovecraft, and now Nic Pizzolatto, the author behind HBO’s True Detective. The vivid miniseries is littered with references to Chambers’s work, hinting that the moody drama may get even darker—and more supernatural. For more on the show, see Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s

Arundhati Roy, William Dalrymple, and Neil Gaiman are among the writers who have condemned Penguin’s decision to collect and destroy Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus in India. Penguin decided to pull the book from shelves in response to legal threats, based on the assertion that Doniger’s study, published in 2009, “hurts the feelings of millions of Hindus.”

The shortlist for the Folio Prize, the first major literary award to consider English-language fiction and poetry from all over the world, has been announced. Five of the eight nominees are American: Bookforum contributor Rachel Kushner,

Penguin India is planning to recall and destroy all copies of scholar Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus: An Alternative History that are currently for sale in India. This measure is the publisher’s response to legal threats made by Hindu nationalists, who have decried the book for “inaccurately representing the religion and offering an overly sexual interpretation of Hindu texts.” The lawsuit against the book, filed by Dina Nath Batra, the head of a Hindu education group in New Delhi, claims that the book has “has hurt the religious feelings of millions of Hindus,” and therefore violates a section

According to the blog EV Grieve, novelist and performer Maggie Estep died earlier this week. In the early '90s, Estep was a vital presence in the East Village spoken-word scene. She appeared regularly on MTV and toured with the Lallapalooza festival in 1994. She has written seven novels, including Diary of an Emotional Idiot (1997) and, more recently, the horsetrack noirs Hex (2003) and Flamethrower (2010).

Ursula Lindsey reports on the 2014 Cairo International Book Fair.

At the New Yorker, George Packer has written a thorough history of Amazon, and asks if the superstore is “bad for books.” Packer writes: "Amazon is not just the 'Everything Store,' to quote the title of Brad Stone’s rich chronicle of Bezos and his company; it’s more like the Everything. What remains constant is ambition, and the search for new things to be ambitious about."

AA Gill has received the annual Hatchet Job Award for his acerbic review of Morrissey’s Autobiography, which the critic called “a cacophony of jangling,

The Wilson Quarterly has drastically cut its staff and will likely cease publication after four decades of distinguished journalism. Paul Maliszewski, a longtime reader and occasional contributor to the quarterly, reflects on the magazine’s past and tries to get answers about its future.

Influential cultural theorist Stuart Hall has died at the age of 82.

The conservative imprint Threshold Editions is planning a biography of Chris Christie, which is scheduled to be published in the spring of 2015. The book’s author, Matt Katz, has reported on the governor for his blog, the Christie Chronicles,

Novelist Alexander Chee has written a thoughtful and eloquent essay about Twitter outrage, Twitter apologies, and how they reflect the world we live in now. "Who knows what we thought we’d get when we let the Internet into our lives," Chee states, "but whatever it was, what we have now is paper tigers burning in the hot wind of the 4G network—and we are racing after them to watch them burn."

In a recently translated essay, W. G. Sebald considers his long fascination with Robert Walser, the endlessly enigmatic Swiss writer: “Who and what Robert Walser really was is a question to which, despite

According to eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, First Look will launch its first digital magazine next week. The new site will be run by Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Jeremy Scahill, and it will kick off with a number of reported pieces on the NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden. First look is also announcing three new hires, journalists Marcy Wheeler, Ryan Gallagher, and Peter Maass, who recently wrote a very interesting article about Poitras and the Snowden leaks for the New York Times Magazine.

Earlier this week, The New York Observer published a scathing critique of the Times editorial