The US Justice Department has concluded that it will most likely not bring charges against Wikileaks mastermind Julian Assange for publishing classified documents. According to the Washington Post, Assange published rather than leaked the classified documents, and therefore government lawyers cannot press charges “without also prosecuting U.S. news organizations and journalists.”

A book of awesome heavy metal bands and their adorable feline friends? Yes, please! 

Yesterday, Sotheby’s auctioned one of the first English-language books published in America, The Whole Booke of Psalmes, for just

Graywolf Press has announced that it will |file://localhost/photo.php|publish Maggie Nelson’s next book|, The Argonauts, which is “a hybrid personal account and theoretical exploration of language and art, "good enough" mothering, queer identity, love, sex, and family.” Hybrid is a good word for Nelson: A poet, memoirist, and cultural critic, she is best known for her rangy study The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning and Bluets, a poetic and personal meditation on the color blue. (You can read her Bookforum Syllabus on Books about Color here.) The Argonauts was acquired by editor Ethan Nosowsky, who

The snazzy new Buenos Aires Review has launched with interviews and fiction and poetry by Juan Alvarez, Mario Bellatin, Vincent Toro, and Kenneth Goldsmith, among others.

More and more people are getting to their news through Facebook. Between August and October, there was a 69 percent increase in traffic referrals from Facebook to partner sites via the BuzzFeed Network, which includes outlets like The Huffington Post, The Onion, and Slate. In other words, ”Facebook appears to have broadly shifted its algorithms and to create formidable new traffic streams that simply weren’t there just weeks

The creative team behind the theatrical adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home talks to the Times about the process of turning a cartoon into a musical, and the difficulties of presenting themes like suicide and coming out of the closet.

The New York Public Library has bought 83-year-old writer Tom Wolfe’s archives for $2.15 million. The archive contains 190 boxes of Wolfe’s writing, including his research, drafts, outlines of novels, unpublished work, and more than 10,000 letters to literary friends such as Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, and William F. Buckley. There are

James McBride, considered an "underdog" contestant, has won this years National Book Award for fiction. Other winners are George Packer (for nonfiction), Mary Szybist (poetry), and Cynthia Kadohata (young people's literature).

A week ago, Wyoming senatorial candidate Liz Cheney made news by publicly breaking with her sister over gay marriage (Liz opposes it; Mary Cheney is gay and in a same-sex marriage). In the wake of the controversy, Elaine Showalter took the opportunity to revisit Lynne Cheney’s frontier novel Sisters, which is “both a pulpy murder mystery, with cattle barons and homesteaders;

Bloomberg News is cutting arts coverage, and very unfortunately, that includes books: The company let go of books editor and National Book Critics Circle president Laurie Muchnick on Monday.

The New York Times talks with William T. Vollmann about The Book of Dolores, a creative account of Vollmann’s female alter-ego. Vollmann started cross-dressing seriously about five years ago, and he tells the Times that after a lifetime of dodging land mines and Afghan warlords, presenting himself as a woman introduced a series of new challenges: “A lot of friends who could always handle the prostitutes

Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing passed away last weekend at her home in London. She was 94. Over the course of her career, Lessing wrote more than fifty novels, and won virtually every major literary award available in Europe. Accepting the Nobel in 2007, the year before she published her last novel, Lessing quipped, "I'm 88 years old and they can't give the Nobel to someone who's dead, so I think they were probably thinking they'd probably better give it to me now before I've popped off." For more on Lessing, read her 2002 interview with Bookforum.

New Yorkers, if you’re free tonight,

A New York court has ruled in favor of Google’s argument that scanning more than twenty million books and posting snippets of them online without permission from the authors does not violate the terms of fair use. The ruling is a major victory for Google, and against the group of authors and publishers who filed the class action suit in 2005. The plaintiff, led by the Authors Guild, had been demanding a payment of $750 for each book scanned.

Simon and Schuster is restructuring its production and manufacturing division to “further integrate the design and creation of e-books into the earliest

At Page Turner, Maria Bustillos weighs in on the controversy surrounding Isaac Fitzgerald’s hiring as Buzzfeed’s books editor—and his declaration to publish only positive reviews—with a bit of background context: “It bears mentioning that Fitzgerald’s views are very much in line with those of the San Francisco literary establishment whence he hails. The influential essay by Heidi Julavits, published more than a decade ago in the Believer, 'Rejoice! Believe! Be Strong and Read Hard!' was written explicitly against 'snark' and in favor of more positive book reviewing.”

Joseph Brodsky dropped

Tuesday was a big day for professional shake-ups in journalism. Following news that reporters Matt Bai and Brian Stelter were leaving the New York Times (for Yahoo! News and CNN, respectively), the big story was that New York Times Magazine editor Hugo Lindgren is on the way out—and apparently not at his own volition. At the Awl, Choire Sicha names fourteen people who could fill Lindgren’s shoes.

Ernest Hemingway put in a word for Ballantine Ale, Frederick Forsyth for Rolex, Mark Twain for Campbell’s soup:

At n+1, Ben Kunkel responds to news of Twitter going public with a manifesto arguing

Morrissey's Autobiography offers very little first-hand insight into the Smiths, but fans can still learn a great deal about the Mozzer's singing by noting the many songs he mentions throughout the book. The Manhattanchester blog has compiled a playlist of them all, complete with links to most of the tunes on Spotify. In addition to well-known Morrissey favorites like the New York Dolls, David Bowie, and T. Rex, there are some deep cuts (The Paper Dolls, Blue Mink, and The Pioneers), as well as hits (Diana Ross's "Reflections"). To hear more about some of his sonic obsessions, check out