This week, OR Books is launching Gay Propaganda, a collection of LGBT stories from Russia, edited by journalist Masha Gessen (author of many books, including Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot) and American activist Joseph Huff-Hannon. Gay Propaganda’s release is timed to coincide with the opening of the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, a country where not only is violence against gays and lesbians rampant, but being out makes you a de facto enemy of the Putin regime. For more on what it is like to be LGBT in Russia, see Jeff Sharlet’s recent GQ article, “Inside the Iron Closet

Roxane Gay has sold her forthcoming book, Hunger: A Weight Memoir, to Harper.

JK Rowling claims in an interview that it was a mistake to pair off Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger. Hermione, Rowling claims, should have wound up in love with Harry Potter. “Am I breaking people’s hearts by saying this?” she asks. Maybe not, but some fans are apparently “outraged”: “"Well thanks Jo for kicking down 10 years of what I consider to be the most beautiful, unconditional & bare bones real relationship that could ever exist between 2 people," writes one Harry Potter fan on the Leaky Cauldron site.

The NYPL invited author and translator Susan Bernofsky and others associated with

Rene Ricard—the artist, critic, and poet—has died. Ricard appeared in films by Andy Warhol and wrote influential Artforum articles about Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Francesco Clemente; his poetry collections include God with Revolver.

At Hyperallergic, Morton Hoi Jensen reports on Triple Canopy’s third annual marathon reading of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans.

When the FBI arrested the man who founded Silk Road on drug-trafficking charges, many people who frequented this online black market were faced with a crisis: Where to continue their book club? In a trend worthy

Author Alain de Botton is leading a new news organization—run entirely by philosophers. The Philosopher's Mail claims to have bureaus in London, Amsterdam, and Melbourne, and is “committed to bringing you the latest, biggest stories, as interpreted by philosophers rather than journalists.” Check out the homepage, which currently offers philosophical takes on tabloid-ready topics such as “Anne Hathaway takes her chocolate labrador Esmeralda for a walk.”

Susan Sontag wrote 17,198 emails. Benjamin Moser, who is writing a biography of Sontag, recently read them. At the New Yorker, he describes

Following the Washington Post’s decision to not fun Ezra Klein’s new online venture (a decision that publisher Katharine Weymouth has defended), the paper has announced in a memo to staffers that it plans to hire a new bloggers and redesign the website.

Oxford papyrologist Dirk Obbink has determined that two poems written on a tattered piece of papyrus were written by Sappho. One of the poems refers to the author’s family; the other is addressed to the Greek goddess Aphrodite.

Since it launched 13 years ago, Inside.com has been “part of a Steve Brill mashup, a dead domain, a planned flagship

Former US president Jimmy Carter is writing “an impassioned account of the human rights abuses against women and girls around the world, particularly in religious societies,” according to Simon & Schuster, which is planning to publish the book in late March.

The MIT Media Lab is teaching a class this semester that aims to make science fiction real. Emphasizing “pataphysics,” or the science of imaginary solutions, the class is taught by Sophia Brueckner and Dan Novy and features William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age, and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Four out of twelve writers named the late, great Kathy Acker among the authors of “books that changed my life,” for a project by n+1 that grew out of an index for the magazine's "No Regrets" series. Acker is cited for the novels The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by The Black Tarantula (1973), Kathy Goes to Haiti (1978), Great Expectations (1983), and Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream (1986). Dennis Cooper, Mary Shelley, Virginia Woolf, and Frank O'Hara also received multiple mentions.

Egypt's National Library and Archives, in Cairo's Bab al-Khalq neighborhood, suffered structural damage

As Jonathan Mahler points out, our current journalistic environment is one that fetishizes longer articles—“even high-metabolism sites like BuzzFeed and Politico are producing their own long-form content.” But does a higher word-count mean higher quality? Mahler’s assessment of the latest long-form trend is too measured to say that it’s all bad, but he does note what’s missing from a lot of immersive journalism today: empathy.

Nixon didn’t talk much about contemporary American authors, but as Jon Wiener writes, he anxiously wanted to discuss Philip Roth. “Roth is a bad man,” the president told

Richard Nash has joined the staff of Byliner, the digital reading service that delivers long-form journalism and fiction to subscribers. Nash, once the publisher of Soft Skull Press and currently the publisher of Red Lemonade, is leaving his position as VP at Small Demons, the company that indexed every |https://www.smalldemons.com/books/Infinite_Jest_David_Foster_Wallace_(1996)|cultural reference| in Infinite Jest. Last fall, Small Demons reported that without a buyer, it would have to close shop.

According to the Financial Times, CNN has laid off forty senior staff members, “including a

In response to anti-gay laws recently passed in Nigeria and Uganda, Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina, author of books such as One Day I Will Write About This Place and editor of the Nairobi-based journal Kwani, has revealed that he is gay.

Triple Canopy has announced the lineup for its third annual marathon reading of Gertrude Stein’s novel The Making of Americans. The event will start this Friday at 5pm and conclude sometime Sunday night, and readers will include Amy Sillman, Lynne Tillman, Charles Bernstein, and many others. If you can’t make it to Triple Canopy’s Brooklyn space, you can

Journalist and policy analyst Ezra Klein is leaving the Washington Post to “start his own venture.” The Times reports that Klein, who runs the paper’s Wonkblog, recently approached publisher Katharine Weymouth to discuss launching a new, WaPo\-backed website “dedicated to explanatory journalism on a wide range of topics beyond political policy.” Weymouth and the the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, decided not to support the venture, so Klein is setting out to start the site elsewhere—and taking two Wonkblog staffers with him. As Bookforum editor |about:blank|Chris Lehmann| quips: “At last—a Buzzfeed